"Tentatively" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Europe. Here we have the tacit assumption, so often made with respect to corporeal structures, that there is some innate tendency towards continued development in mind and body. But development of all kinds depends on many concurrent favourable circumstances. Natural selection acts only tentatively. Individuals and races may have acquired certain indisputable advantages, and yet have perished from failing in other characters. The Greeks may have retrograded from a want of coherence between the many ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... his divinity, inquiring mutely whether that divinity would permit a common warrior like himself to come and kiss her hand. She saw him finally and extended one hand idly; at which Hec dropped his ears, wagged his tail uncertainly, and came on slowly up the stair. He nozzled his head tentatively against her knee; and so, receiving sanction, went into delighted waggings, licking tenderly the soft white hand which stroked ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... clusters of creamy blossoms, across the path and the steps of the porch. Alix looked up at the outward curve of the reversed branches, bent almost to the splitting point in the unfamiliar direction, and whistled. She tentatively tugged at a loose spray, and ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... idea o' proposin' that you and me just took a look around that holler whar you thought you saw suthin'!" said Collinson tentatively. ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... heard the news at the hotel. She paused a moment to collect herself, and then said slowly and tentatively, with a watchful intensity in her eyes, "Mrs. Barker went, ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... persons who talk Southern English or what is called P.S.P. (see p. 38); to some of them the word may be unknown, and if it is known, they avoid using it because it sounds to them strange or affected. It is difficult to prove that any particular word is in this condition, and the list is offered tentatively. It is made from Jones' dictionary, which is therefore allowed to rule whether the word is obsolescent rather than obsolete: some of these seem to be truly obsolete. Some will appear to be convincing examples of obsolescence, others not; but it must be remembered ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... her: was it only a month ago she had stood in this room in the moonlight, waiting to go and meet Ishmael in the field? Her fingers shook a little as she took a few blossoms of creamy-yellow toadflax he had picked for her out of their vase and laid them tentatively against her gown. They harmonised to perfection, but Blanche, after a moment's hesitation, flung ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... exorcised one. Doubts I could stand. Imaginings I could stand. But doubts and imaginings together made a force so fell that I was driven to accept any reading of the mystery which might presumably afford a foothold for satisfying thought. And so I came to accept tentatively the Vampire theory—accept it, at least, so far as to examine it as judicially as was given me to do. As the days wore on, so the conviction grew. The more I read on the subject, the more directly the evidences pointed towards this view. ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... grassy pocket, where she thought there might be roots to dig. The way was steep, winding down between rocks and stunted trees and tangles of thick shrubbery, with here and there a black-green spur of the fir forests thrust up tentatively from the lower slopes. Now and again it led across a naked shoulder of the mountain, revealing, far down, a landscape of dark, wide stretching, bluish woods, with desolate, glimmering lakes strung ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... in the least 'nice' of me," retorted the other. "I happen to be giving a singing-lesson at half-past five, that's all." After a pause she added tentatively: "Nan, why don't you take ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... sometimes on the other. Even then the sense of my dreadful contiguity apparently would come upon her like a fresh discovery, and she would become hysterical. But I do not think that she really SAW me. She looked at the riata and sniffed it disparagingly, she pawed some pebbles that were near me tentatively with her small hoof; she started back with a Robinson Crusoe-like horror of my footprints in the wet gully, but my actual personal presence she ignored. She would sometimes pause, with her head thoughtfully between her fore-legs, and apparently say: "There is some extraordinary ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... somewhat tentatively tried this on in Octavius. It was no good. His parishioners were of the sort who would have come to church eight times a day on Sunday, instead of two, if occasion offered. The hope that even a portion of them would stop away, and that their places would be taken ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... significance of the symptoms of Influenza should make it sufficiently apparent that its cause is fundamental, widespread and deeply rooted in the organism—a menace not to be lightly and tentatively treated with impunity. That the disease is not one that may be met—with any prospect of success—with febrifuges, drugs, serums and specifics—to say nothing of whisky and the like futilities, to use no harsher term, such as are said to ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... door and tried it tentatively—no inside doorknob, of course, this wasn't a hotel. He looked through the bars—nothing but corridor and the cell on the other side. Should he call? For an instant the fantastic idea of crying "Waiter!" or ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... care to ascertain if she had replenished the lilacs in the tower room, and, at lunch, which was shared with three farm college students from Davis, he found himself forced to extemporize a busy afternoon for himself when Paula tentatively suggested that she would drive Graham up ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... of brown sporangia with short black stipes, borne often as Dr. Peck found them, assembled on living leaves, distinguish this little species. In the former edition this form was tentatively enrolled under S. axifera (Bull.); but see further ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... light ploughed overhead. Night turned to ghostly day on the instant, then blacker night descended. But to the southeast a noiseless commotion was apparent. The glowing greenish gauze was in a ferment, bubbling, uprearing, downfalling, and tentatively thrusting huge bodiless hands into the upper ether. Once more a cyclopean rocket twisted its fiery way across the sky, from horizon to zenith, and on, and on, in tremendous flight, to horizon again. But the span could not hold, and in its wake the black night brooded. And yet again, broader, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... because an injury by a bullet of small calibre, capable of seriously displacing fragments, has probably at the same time produced grave changes in the cord. In the presence of severe immediate symptoms we may tentatively assume that a simultaneous destructive lesion has been produced. In such injuries pain, combined with a tendency to improvement in the paralytic symptoms and return of reflexes, is the only point in favour ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... have survived, and at least three medieval equatoria are known. Chaucer is well known for his treatise on the astrolabe; a manuscript in Cambridge, containing a companion treatise on the equatorium, has been tentatively suggested by the present author as also being the work of Chaucer and the only piece written in his ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... do what it can with them. It cannot ignore them. Slowly, civilizations, to some degree rational, have come into being. In so far as they are rational, they are justified. Keeping all this in view we may say, tentatively: ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... a rock, and said tentatively, "There is such a thing as being too proud to fight." He shook his bald head disgustedly, and tried, "The only enduring peace is a peace without victory," but that did not seem to content him either. Afterward he cried out, "All persons who oppose me have pygmy ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... Tentatively, Brice drew aside an armful of branches, just above the waiting dog. And, as though he had pulled back a curtain, he found himself facing a well-defined path, cut through the tangled thicket of root and trunk and bough—a path that wound out of sight ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... them, and some other course should be suggested. We do not advise either medium or sitters to blindly accept or follow what is given to or through them. Reason should ever reign, but even reason will show that in experimental work it is sometimes advisable to tentatively adopt and follow some course that may not, at first sight, ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... arguments served to mask other motives, as did Knox's rejection of recruitment on the grounds that integrating women into the Navy was difficult enough without taking on the race (p. 087) problem.[3-94] In April 1943 Knox "tentatively" approved the "tentative" outline of a bureau plan for the induction of up to 5,000 black WAVES, but nothing came of it.[3-95] Given the secretary's frequent protestation that the subject was under constant review,[3-96] and his statement to Captain McAfee that black WAVES would be enlisted ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... Platt and of the corporations affected found they could do no better, they assented to this proposition. Efforts were tentatively made to outwit me, by inserting amendments that would nullify the effect of the law, or by withdrawing the law when the Legislature convened; which would at once have deprived me of the whip hand. On May 12 I wrote Senator Platt, outlining the amendments I desired, and ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... tentatively at each other and were silent. Gustavo who had been hanging officiously in the rear, approached and begged ...
— Jerry Junior • Jean Webster
... tentatively, after a pause, "that I'm one hell of a sinner myself, according to ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... shelter of the galley whence he inspected his superior quizzically. At length, when the hands were getting their supper, eating on the forecastle head in order to maintain their attitude of alertness, the mate joined Bill and remarked tentatively: ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... Tentatively, I diverged from this subject towards other and wider fields. Impressions of Guernsey, which drew from him his address, at the St. Peter's Port Hotel. The horrors of the sea passage from Weymouth, which extorted a comment on the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... parlous state was, in the main, physical, air and movement, along with the direct call on her attention, steadied the one and knit up the ravelled edges of the other. By the time the plateau was reached and the hill lay behind her, she could afford to walk the horse, tentatively invite her soul, and attempt to hold communion with Nature. Sorrow—as well as the Napoleonic Patch—still sat very squarely beside her; but the nightmare of mortality, with consequent blankness and emptiness, was no longer omnipresent. Interest ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... be a genuine convenience from the point of view of science, for it does introduce, at least provisionally, a certain order into a vast number of facts, and gives a direction to investigation. Perhaps the wisest thing to do is, not to combat the doctrine, but to accept it tentatively and to examine carefully what conclusions it may seem to carry with it—how it may affect our outlook upon ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... age and obligation: 19 years of age for compulsory military service; conscript service obligation - 12 months; 18 years of age for volunteers; plans are to phase out conscription, tentatively moving to an all-professional force by 2007; under current law, every citizen is entitled to serve in the armed ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... idea at first tentatively, in an anonymous publication; but afterwards he espoused it openly and urged its tenability. Coming just after Davy's dissociation of some supposed elements, the idea proved alluring, and for a time gained such popularity that chemists were disposed to round out the observed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... back toward the cabin, feeling old and uncertain, not quite knowing what to do with himself. Old Tom was over by the lean-to, sniffing and pawing tentatively at the fresh earth where Ed had filled in the hole. As Ed came up, he came over ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... sudden and unexpected turn that these unpractised minds were not prepared for it, and had come to a standstill, like a stopped clock, under the shock. But after a little the machinery began to work again, tentatively, and by twos and threes the men put their heads together and privately buzzed over this and that and the other proposition. One of these propositions met with much favor; it was, to confer upon the assassin a vote of thanks for removing Flint Buckner, and let him go. But the cooler ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the horse that looked vaguely like Johnny turned away from the water-hole and sneezed while he appeared to be wondering what to do next. He moved slowly toward the packs that were thrown down just where they had been taken from the horses, and began nosing tentatively about. ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... had done his rival an injustice. That was in thinking Professor Beecher was responsible for the treachery of Jacinto. That was due to the plotter's own work. It was true that Professor Beecher had tentatively engaged Jacinto, and had sent word to him to keep other explorers away from the vicinity of the ancient city if possible; but Jacinto, who did not return Professor Bumper's money, as he had promised, had acted ...
— Tom Swift in the Land of Wonders - or, The Underground Search for the Idol of Gold • Victor Appleton
... Royal Artillery Institution at Woolwich, was also separately published under the title of "The Future of England." The two former, being addressed to working-men, laborers, and traders, discuss economic problems, and set forth tentatively their author's antagonized political ethics, with which, in drawing this essay to a close, we ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... with his sensitive upper lip he discovered it to be firm as a rock. Next he backed away and wrenched tentatively at the halter until convinced that the throat strap was thoroughly sound. His last effort must have been an inspiration. Attacking the taut buckskin rope with his teeth he worked diligently until he had severed three of the four strands. ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... put my oar in, I see," observed he, tentatively, as he drew forward a small table whereon were set three glasses and a bottle of the ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... to Mrs. Tighe's room to say good-bye. Awkwardly and with the bearlike roughness of excessive timidity I put my arms about her, drew her to me tentatively. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... course he knew of her life-long devotion to Caseldy; but there was archness in her tone. However, he did not expect a woman of her education to have the tone perfectly concordant with the circumstances. Speaking tentatively of Caseldy's handsome face and figure, he was pleased to hear the duchess say, 'So I ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... nation of northeastern United States and Canada. At the time of the coming of the Europeans to America, the Indian population in general was nomadic, in the hunter-fisher stage of progress; but many of the tribes had tentatively engaged in agriculture, cultivating maize, squashes, and in some cases fruits. Probably the larger supply of food was from animals, birds, fish, and shell-fish, edible roots and grains, such as the wild rice, and fruits from the native trees in the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... forwards in the parlor, audible but not visible at first, being engaged with something or other in that part of the room which the door still concealed. What the something might be, the sound soon explained; he was applying keys tentatively to a cupboard, a closet, and a scrutoire, in the hidden part of the room. Very soon, however, he came into view; but, fortunately for the young man, at this critical moment, the murderer's purpose too entirely absorbed him to allow of his throwing ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... you have a good large safe," remarked Nelson, tentatively. The three conspirators parted with mutual expressions of confidence ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... tentatively readjusted his lip. "I don't envy Wilkins his job breaking in that man when he ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... faint and far, like the shadows of voices, came the wrangling of boys in thin shrill tones. A dog thrust his head into the entrance and blinked wolfishly at them for a space, the slaver dripping from his ivory-white fangs. After a time he growled tentatively, and then, awed by the immobility of the human figures, lowered his head and grovelled away backward. Tantlatch ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... essential good quality whatever inherent in the Democratic Idea. [Footnote: There are excellent possibilities, both in the United States and in this Empire, of trying over such a method as this, and of introducing it tentatively and piecemeal. In Great Britain already there are quite different methods of election for Parliament existing side by side. In the Hythe division of Kent, for example, I vote by ballot with elaborate secrecy; in the University of London I declare my ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... surmises has been heard hinting tentatively at a possible re-grouping of European Powers. The alliance of the three Empires is supposed possible. And it may be possible. The myth of Russia's power is dying very hard—hard enough for that combination to take place—such is the fascination that a discredited show of numbers will ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... think Lily Bell would like that," she began to say, tentatively, when differences of opinion as to his conduct came up between Raymond and herself. "I think she ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... this time on foot, along the sun-baked pavements, through courts and alleys into a narrow, busy street in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch. He stopped at last before a factory and looked tentatively up at the windows. Through the opened panes came the constant click of sewing machines, the smell of cloth, the vision of many heads bent over their work. He stood where he was for a time and watched. The place was like a hive of industry. Row ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... these last, and the other two were of course Leithgow and Friday. But had they survived the outrush of air? Carse felt in his left glove for the suit's gravity control lever; found it and tentatively moved it. His acceleration slowly increased. He brought the lever part-way back. Then, into the microphone encased inside the ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... Perry tentatively gathered up the body and legs and wrapped them about him, tying the hind legs as a girdle round his waist. The effect on the whole was bad. It was even irreverent—like one of those mediaeval pictures of a monk ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... was a very comfortable, well-furnished room at the back of the house, crowded with books and newspapers, and prospectuses, magazines, and all possible impedimenta of journalism, on the outer edge of which women were beginning with faltering footsteps tentatively to tread. Mrs. Needham not only wrote "provincial letters" (with a difference!), but contributed social and statistical papers to several of the leading periodicals; and one of Katherine's duties was to write out her rough notes, and make extracts from the books, Blue and others, ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... Picked up her pencil, rolled it a moment in her palms, then, catching her toes behind either foreleg of her chair, in an attitude that was as workmanlike as it was ungraceful, she began to draw, nervously, tentatively at first, but gaining in firmness and assurance as she ...
— Fanny Herself • Edna Ferber
... would indicate a rainfall of about eight inches over the twenty-five square miles. As that much does not appear to have fallen at the hotel and dam it is more than likely that even more than eight inches were precipitated in the places further up. These figures I hold tentatively, but I am much inclined to believe that there was ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... "Well," said the attorney, tentatively, after another pause, "Mr. Mainwaring's character, whatever it may have been before we were associated with him, certainly had no effect upon your life or mine, hence I feel that it is nothing with which we are directly concerned; and ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... tracks says more'n that. He's got his own ways, I'll allow, but down at bottom, an' all through, I know the' ain't no better man livin'. No, ma'am, the' ain't, an' what he's ben to me, Cynthy Cullom, nobody knows but me—an'—an'—mebbe the Lord—though I hev seen the time," she said tentatively, "when it seemed to me 't I knowed more about my affairs 'n He did," and she looked doubtfully at her companion, who had been following her with affirmative and sympathetic nods, and now drew her chair a little closer, and said softly: "Yes, yes, I know. I ben putty doubtful an' ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... only Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, but even artists like Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer worked by mathematical processes, and their testimony would probably give results more exact than that of Montaigne or Shakespeare; but, to save trouble, one might tentatively carry back the same ratio of acceleration, or retardation, to the year 1400, with the help of Columbus and Gutenberg, so taking a uniform rate during the whole four centuries (1400-1800), and leaving to statisticians the task ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of light to send telephonic messages, through the sensitiveness of a certain metal which changes its electric resistance in accord with the intensity of the light that strikes it. Thus with a beam of light we can reproduce the human voice. Well, what we have done awkwardly and tentatively by the aid of imperfect mechanical contrivances, Nature has here accomplished perfectly through the peculiar composition of the air and some special adjustment of the auditory ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... determining Good having been set aside, it is suggested that it is only by 'interrogating experience' that we can discover, tentatively, ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of Mark or Luke. Of John's contributions one—the feeding of the multitudes—is clearly located by its identity with a narrative found in all the other gospels. The visit to Jerusalem at the unnamed feast can be only tentatively placed. ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... in "Natural Religion," and put forward, as I understand the author, tentatively, and for what it is worth, and by no means as expressing his own assured convictions, is this:—that to banish the supernatural from the human mind is "not to destroy theology or religion or even Christianity, ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... a desire to lead the subject back to the case of men who disappeared, turned in the deck-chair where he was sitting enjoying a light breeze which had sprung up after dark, and said tentatively: 'I can't quite understand, you know, a man disappearing altogether and leaving no traces ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... get rid of them as landlords, not as individuals. I don't even know that I'd take away the land from them all at once, you know (though I don't think it's justly theirs); I'd deprive them of it tentatively and gradually.' ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... also developing certain markings which tended to confirm my original suspicion that it was some species of leopard, or panther, a circumstance that not only occasioned me considerable uneasiness but also led me to impart my fears to Billy, and even to hint tentatively at the advisability of shooting the creature before the full development of its natural proclivities should render it actually dangerous. But Billy indignantly scouted the suggestion that his pet could possibly develop dangerous tendencies, directing my attention to the affection which it ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... colors—he was good-looking, "sort of distinguished, when he wants to be," had a line, and was properly inconstant. In fact, he summed up all the romance that her age and environment led her to desire. She wondered if those were his dancing-shoes that fox-trotted tentatively around ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... responsible for what you laugh at: very often people say things tentatively to see if you will laugh: you help to fix their standard by the way you take it, and you often throw your weight into the wrong scale because you are afraid of seeming priggish. A man's sense of humour is different from a woman's; when you go into the world ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... quite sentimental and poetical had he not noticed that the gray eyes which often rested tentatively and meaningly on himself, even while apparently listening to Richards, were more than ever like the eyes of the mustang on whose scarred flanks her glance had ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... ask this tentatively; he really did think that his grandfather was very nice, although he had been puzzled and not a little frightened by his bushy black eyebrows slanting up to a profusion of white hair. Mark had never seen such eyebrows, and he wondered ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... man?" said Merritt, tentatively. "Long, thin beard and slightly marked with small-pox? Gave ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... effect. An attempt was made by Administration leaders to force a vote on May 19, 1918. Friends interceded when it was shown that not enough votes were pledged to secure passage. Again the vote was tentatively set for June 27th ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... visited this country. At the instigation of Mr. R. P. Elliot, the organizer, Vice-President and Secretary of the Austin Organ Company, of Hartford, Conn., he decided to remain here and join that corporation, taking the office of Vice-president. Subsequently a new firm—Hope-Jones & Harrison—was tentatively formed at Bloomfield, N. J., in July, 1904, but as sufficient capital could not be obtained, Hope-Jones and his corps of skilled employees joined the Ernest M. Skinner Company, of Boston, Hope-Jones taking the office of Vice-president, in 1905. Working in connection with the Skinner ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... answer to the question: What is the rate of interest likely to be after the war? may be given, in Quaker fashion, by another question: What will happen to the index number of the prices of commodities? It seems fairly probable that both these questions may be answered, very tentatively and diffidently, by the expression of a hope that after a time, when peace conditions have settled down and all the merchant ships of the world have been restored to their peaceful occupations, the general level of the price of commodities will be materially lower than it is now, though probably ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... extreme caution. They were still talking behind him as he turned from the corridor into the passageway leading to the store, and from there into the store itself. And then suddenly, in spite of caution, his foot slipped on the bare floor. It was not much—just enough to cause his other foot, poised tentatively in air, to come heavily down, and a loud and complaining creak echoed ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... loved to adjust them tentatively, with various hypotheses as to the precise manner in which they thus went together. Meantime they have figured plausibly as representative of Attic sculpture at the end of its first period, still immature indeed, but with a just claim to take breath, so to speak, having now accomplished some stades ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... along the road, beside the river. As usual, he did not speak to her, but stared straight in front of him, the ribbons seeming to lie quite loosely in his slender, white hands. Marguerite looked at him tentatively once or twice; she could see his handsome profile, and one lazy eye, with its straight fine brow and drooping ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... and after him Dryden and the eighteenth century, regarding poetry generally as a thing apart, followed the latter sort; but when the Romantic Revival brought poetry back to ordinary human life there reappeared, tentatively, of course, a simpler blank verse in Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, and Wordsworth. A clear example is the opening ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... interest shown, to repay the time and money spent upon her. Her eyes grew wistful as she leant nearer to see if there were any tell-tale traces of tears, then danced with sudden amusement as she picked up a powder puff and dabbed tentatively. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... four of his Raiatea men bent to the oars. As they landed on the beach he looked curiously at the women under the schooner's awning. He waved his hand tentatively, and they, after giggling, ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... interesting one of all connected with this tragedy, should have been kept so long in reserve and brought out just at this time, struck many of Mr. Jeffrey's closest friends as unnecessarily dramatic; but when the coroner, lifting out the ribbon, remarked tentatively, "You know this ribbon?" we were more struck by the involuntary cry of surprise which rose from some one in the crowd about the door, than by the look with which Mr. Jeffrey eyed it and made the necessary reply. That ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... it was deceptively easy. Diablo stood perfectly unconcerned as Bull raised himself on the bars of the fence. And when the long legs of Bull were passed over his back, Diablo merely turned his head and sniffed the shoe tentatively. Slowly, very softly, steadying himself on the top bar of the fence, Bull lowered his weight more and more until the whole burden was on the back of the stallion—and then he took his ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... that sounds!" he said heartily, "Lady Agatha! Lady Agatha! Why don't we have some such custom in America?" He tried it tentatively. "Lady Marietta—that's my mother's name—don't seem to fit altogether does it? Lady Maggie—Oh, Lord! awful! No, I guess we'd better stick to Miss and Mrs. But it ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... with extinction. Mr Wells' own sight of our blindness, our complacent acceptance of the sphere as an oblate or prolate spheroid, might be, he hoped, another of the marvels which we should come to accept through the medium of romance. So he began tentatively at first to introduce a vivid criticism of the futility of present-day society into his fantasies, and the first and the least of these books was that published in 1899 as When the Sleeper Wakes, a title afterwards changed to The ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... Mr. Conrad it is as though mystery, instead of dwelling in people and things like a light, hung about them like an aura. Mr. Kipling communicates to us aggressively what our eyes can see. Mr. Conrad communicates to us tentatively what only his eyes can see, and in so doing gives a new significance to things. Occasionally he leaves us puzzled as to where in the world the significance can lie. But of the presence of this significance, this mystery, we are as uncannily ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... it tentatively, my dear; We will say two bottles, and we will make the first inroad on our poultry yard. We had twenty eggs, this morning; and the woman downstairs reports that two of the hens want to sit, though how they explained the matter to her is more than I know; anyhow, we can afford ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... but one thing for Hamilton to do, and he lied with his unsurpassable eloquence. When he paused tentatively, his wife remarked:— ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... and the book was issued in September or October. The anonymous translator was Pastor Mittelstedt[33] in Braunschweig (Hirsching und Jrdens say Hofprediger), whom the partisan Bttiger calls the ever-ready manufacturer of translations (der allezeit fertige Uebersetzungsfabrikant). Behmer tentatively suggests Weis as the translator of this early rendering, an error into which he is led evidently by a remark in Bode's preface in which the apologetic translator states the rumor that Weis was engaged in translating the same ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... prose than in the verse. The first set are in the same hand as the text, the second in another hand: but both of them have the character, not of variants from some other MSS., but of alternative expressions put down tentatively. If either hand is Saxo's it is probably the second. He may conceivably have dictated both at different times to different scribes. No other man would tinker the style in this fashion. A complete translation of all these changes has been deemed unnecessary ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... cactus-flowers. "Sometimes," she added, "I think it's just flightiness—and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study." She glanced tentatively at Selden's motionless profile, and resumed with a slight sigh: "Well, all I can say is, I wish she'd give ME some of her discarded opportunities. I wish we could change places now, for instance. ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... a few passes with his hand in front of the baby's face. Then he gave it a little poke in the ribs, tentatively. The effect was like adding ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... of Michigan? An endowment twice as large as ours would be unavailing.'' Therefore it was that I broached, as a practical measure, in my "plan of organization,'' the system which I had discussed tentatively with George William Curtis several years before, and to which he referred afterward in his speech at the opening of the university at Ithaca. This was to take into our confidence the leading professors in the more important institutions of learning, and to secure from them, not the ordinary, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... item, resolving to add it to my list of curious Americanisms. Already I had begun a narrative of my adventures in this wild land, a thing I had tentatively entitled, "Alone in ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... uncommunicative engineer apprentices and a silent bagman. The food, as usual in Belgium, was of a nondescript occasional character; indeed I have never been able to detect anything in the nature of a meal among this pleasing people; they seem to peck and trifle with viands all day long in an amateur spirit: tentatively French, truly German, and somehow falling between ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... decide approximately the whereabouts of his prey by the momentary shaking of a twig. He raised his rifle and covered that twig steadily; his forefinger played tentatively on the trigger; but on second thoughts he refrained. He was keenly conscious of the fact that the beast was doing its work with skill superior to his own. In comparison to his, its movements were almost noiseless. Jack Meredith was too clever ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... was in a fix as it was, for the scrawled writing made no sense whatever, as far as she could see. She arranged it tentatively, scattered the pieces again and laboriously pieced them ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... three days after the sensational developments related in the preceding chapter. Mr. Blackford, recognizing the peculiar mark on Amy's arm, tentatively decided she was his long-missing sister, and a reference to the documents, as well as a communication with Mr. and Mrs. Stonington, bore this out. Amy was not the relative of the Deepdale Stoningtons. There had been a mix-up in the babies rescued from the flood, and, ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Winter Camp - Glorious Days on Skates and Ice Boats • Laura Lee Hope
... hole doubtfully. There oughtn't to be any hole there at all. That was a curious way to fix tiles, such precious tiles as ours. I slipped my hand in and tentatively tested the black wall, and discovered that the other tiles, as might be expected, had been properly put in; that ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... but the prelude to the work so varied, gifted and vastly influential, which the sex was to do in the modern Novel; so that, at present, in an open field and no favors given, they are honorable rivals of men, securing their full share of public favor. And the English Novel, written by so many tentatively during these fifty years when the form was a-shaping, culminates at the turn of the century in two contrasted authors compared with whom all that went before seems but preparatory; one a man, the other a woman, who together express ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... old man became aware of their presence, he straightened himself up with the slow movement of one stiff with age or rheumatism and threw them a tentatively friendly look out of ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... early works of the last decade of the fourteenth century, from which we gather that he began as a Byzantine, but that he imitated Guariento and was tentatively drawn to the Giottesque movement, but not, we may remember, before Giotto had been dead for some sixty years. Niccolo di Pietro has been confounded with Niccolo Semitocolo, but it is now realised that they were two distinct masters. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... poor Philip, Mr. Lightmark?" asked Mrs. Sylvester tentatively. "You must bring him here very soon, and make him give an account ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... snow. There was not a living creature to be seen, and my dog, a little sharp-nosed black beast, shivered as he looked about, with wide eyes and quick-set ears, for a friendly sight, and held one paw tentatively in the air, as if he feared ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... Willoughby, Scremerston smoking with Logan; while the white dress of Lady Alice flitted ghost-like on the lawn, and the tip of the Prince's cigar burned red in the neighbourhood. In the drawing-room Lady Mary was tentatively conversing with the Jesuit, that mild but probably dangerous animal. She had the curiosity which pious maiden ladies feel about the member of a community which they only know through novels. Certainly this Jesuit was very ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... and his motley followers disappeared in the dusk than Smith unslung his basket-pack, fished out a big electric torch, flashed it tentatively, and then, reslinging the pack and taking his rifle in his left hand, he set off ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... Tentatively, she pushed her chair back from the table and arose. She had to brush close by the other table to get to the bar. As she did, the dark, slick-haired man reached out and grabbed her around the waist with ...
— The Jupiter Weapon • Charles Louis Fontenay
... sure that this had cost him Peter, whom he had come to as his oldest and best friend. Having no idea whom he could turn to next, he rose, tentatively, and for the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... said tentatively. "How can my actions influence those of my husband? I am a prisoner in Boulogne: he probably is not aware of that fact ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... scant respect for the upholstery, and examined the damaged drapery. Descending, he tugged tentatively at the other curtain, first with his right hand, then with his left; then with both. The fabric gave a little at the last test. Jones disappeared ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ill at ease and out of place amid the familiar surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farm boy my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands cracked and sore from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her parlor organ, fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she, beside me, made ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather |
