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More "Equivocal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dressed, partly by hand and partly by animal power. But the processes were imperfect, very tedious, very destructive to the laborer, and very exhausting to the animal power. The planter regarded a good crop as an equivocal blessing, for as the product was great so in proportion was the labor of preparing it for market. While matters stood thus, the planters were released from their painful condition by a circumstance so curious that it deserves a place in ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... juncture a love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... infusion will be destroyed by its pernicious qualities. Nothing is more prejudicial to the health, or the intellectual faculties of mankind, than adulterated liquors. Articles which in their purest state are of an equivocal character, and never to be trusted without caution, are thus converted into decided poisons.—Another way of making wormwood ale. Take a quantity of the herb, according to the intended strength of the liquor, and infuse it for half an hour in the boiling ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... campaign Harding's position on the League of Nations had been so equivocal that the public knew not what to expect, but when Hughes and Hoover were appointed members of the Cabinet, it was generally expected that the new administration would go into the League with reservations. ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... latter words was equivocal, and while he remained in doubt whether a gentle irony was or was not inwrought with their sound, she swept lightly round and left him alone. He saw her form get smaller and smaller along the damp belt of sea-sand between ebb and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... profound regret. But he felt that, having been induced to undertake the defense by representations not justified in fact, and by an impression of the nature of the case which developments in the court-room had not confirmed, he had the right to step aside out of an equivocal position. He wished to do this without injury to the prisoner and while there was yet an opportunity for him to obtain other counsel. The whole tenor of the speech was the right to be relieved from the obligation of an error; an error that had involved him ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... procured in that State of uncertain qualities; and the dog had grown old over coon-trails. He was black and white, grizzled and battlescarred; and if ever a dog had an evil eye, Moze was that dog. He had a way of wagging his tail—an indeterminate, equivocal sort of wag, as if he realized his ugliness and knew he stood little chance of making friends, but was still hopeful and willing. As for me, the first time he manifested this evidence of a good heart under a rough ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... de Lotbiniere, 'the year 1775. Those Canadians, who spoke nothing but French, showed their attachment to their sovereign in a manner not at all equivocal. They helped to defend this province. This city, these walls, this chamber in which I have the honour to speak, were saved partly through their zeal and their courage. You saw them join with faithful subjects of ...
— The 'Patriotes' of '37 - A Chronicle of the Lower Canada Rebellion • Alfred D. Decelles
... and my business frankly. I said I heard the house was considered to be haunted—that I had a strong desire to examine a house with so equivocal a reputation—that I should be greatly obliged if he would allow me to hire it, though only for a night. I was willing to pay for that privilege whatever he might be inclined to ask. "Sir," said Mr. J——, with ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... recommendation. With the same view, I will venture to say a few words upon another characteristic of these compositions almost equally striking; namely, the homeliness of some of the inscriptions, the strangeness of the illustrative images, the grotesque spelling, with the equivocal meaning often struck out by it, and the quaint jingle of the rhymes. These have often excited regret in serious minds, and provoked the unwilling to good-humoured laughter. Yet, for my own part, without affecting any superior ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... it came to see, was not designed for seeing, nor the hand for handling—then, we suppose, he is justly chargeable with denying, and very needlessly denying, all design in organic Nature; otherwise, we suppose not. Why, if Darwins well-known passage about the eye[III-10] equivocal though some of the language be—does not imply ordaining and directing intelligence, then he refutes his own theory as effectually as any of his opponents are ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Antoine's equivocal statement as to Mrs. Bashford's age was ridiculous. Instead of the middle-aged woman whom I was prepared to meet, here was beyond question a vigorous, healthy being whose every movement spoke for youth and the joy of life. It might, after all, be the maid of whom Antoine had spoken; I ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission from sire to son of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher"—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Protestant. They may also recollect, that the exiled king was received most hospitably by the grand monarque, Louis XIV., who gave him palaces, money, and all that he required, and, moreover, gave him a fine army and fleet to go to Ireland and recover his kingdom, bidding him farewell with this equivocal sentence, "That the best thing he, Louis, could wish to him was, never to see his face again." They may further recollect, that King James and King William met at the battle of the Boyne, in which ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... to appease him with additional money, the walls were already placarded with the words: "Minoret is a thief." All those whom he met commiserated him and asked him who was the author of the anonymous placard. Fortunately for him, everybody made allowance for his equivocal replies by reflecting on his utter stupidity; fools get more advantage from their weakness than able men from their strength. The world looks on at a great man battling against fate, and does not help him, but it supplies the capital of a grocer who may ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... When seen at that hour, he appeared under the figure of a tall and mighty warrior, with abundance of the gray plumes of the eagle on his head, and a gray robe of wolf-skin thrown around him, standing upright upon his rock in front of the waterfalls. In the day time his appearance was more equivocal. Those who supposed they saw him saw something swimming about the cascade, as a frog swims under the surface. But none were ever permitted to behold him near, and face to face. As the observer drew nigh, the figure gradually disappeared, sinking ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... ask old ladies to tea, Or invite male supporters to crumpets or cricket; Should a snug Party Club prove a trifle too free, Or give an equivocal "treat," or hat-ticket; A seven years' nursing of Slopville-on-Slime, A well-fought Election and Glorious Victory (Crowed o'er by proud Party prints at the time) May—lose you your Seat. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... was conditional on the abandonment of the greater part of the rest of the Treaty, it could hardly be regarded as a serious one.[143] But the German Delegation would have done better if they had stated in less equivocal language how far they felt able ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... discovery of the passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope the identity of this island as described or alluded to by writers is often equivocal, or to be ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... a paper he got at Kimberley, so that when he stepped out upon Johannesburg station, from a difficult, perplexing, somewhat equivocal situation he found himself suddenly and unexpectedly ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... sleep that night, and awoke to the decision that she would not be so foolishly unhappy any more. She would shut her eyes to the haunting horrors, and forget. Theo had forbidden her to make herself too miserable. Why should she not obey him? And she proceeded to do so in her own equivocal fashion. ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... under this; she was so young and innocent-looking, this girlish little English mademoiselle. Monsieur up-stairs must be a lucky man to have won her tender young heart so utterly. Strange and equivocal a thing as the pretty child (she seemed a child to him) was doing, he never for an instant doubted the ignorant faith and love that shone in the depths of her beautiful agonized eyes. He bowed to her as deferentially as to a sultana, ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... judicious beliefs, as scales and roundles to mount the pinnacles and highest pieces of divinity. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, where- in, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... probably alluded to under the allegorical description of the fatal lock of hair, though why it should be depicted in that form especially, it is difficult to guess. The change of Scylla into a lark, or partridge, and of her father into a sea eagle, are poetical fictions based on the equivocal meanings of their names, the one Greek and the other Hebrew; for the name 'Ciris' resembles the Greek verb keiro, which signifies 'to clip,' or 'cut short.' 'Nisus,' too, resembles the Hebrew word 'Netz,' which means a bird resembling ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... as their neighbors the Belgians, nor the meerschaum so largely as their German neighbors on the Rhine frontier. A notable bit of sharp practice is on record in connexion with the pipe-smokers of Holland—a dodge only to be justified on the equivocal maxim that all is fair in trade provided it just keeps within the margin we need not speak. A pipe manufactory was established in Flanders about the middle ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... was preeminently the land of material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach; patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtile and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, she grew upon the gaze of the world, a signal example ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... Mr.—— had occasion to employ an agent whose services differed but little from those of a common spy. This man, as will easily be understood, belonged to a condition in life which rendered him the least reluctant to appear in so equivocal a character. He was poor, ignorant, so far as the usual instruction was concerned; but cool, shrewd, and fearless by nature. It was his office to learn in what part of the country the agents of the crown ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Parson Trulliber's pipe, but that pig-breeder and lover can hardly have been a non-smoker. Both the other clerical characters who appear in the book, the Roman Catholic priest who makes an equivocal appearance in the eighth chapter of the third book, and Parson Barnabas, who thinks that his own sermons are at least equal to Tillotson's, smoke their pipes. The other smokers in "Joseph Andrews" are the surgeon and the exciseman who, early in the story, are found sitting in ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... know best, if yesterday's Flood has not washed away your memory; But that's a trifle. I stand here accused, In phrases not equivocal, by yon Intendant, of the pillage of your person Or chamber:—is the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support. There were plenty of singular things they were NOT enamoured of—flights ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... of her attitude flashed over him, all doubt vanished, all the comedy of their encounter was gone in an instant. Over him swept a startled sequence of emotions—bitter contempt for Dysart, scorn of the wretchedly equivocal situation and of the society that bred it, a miserable desire to spare her, vexation at himself for what he had unwittingly stumbled upon. The last thought persisted, dominated; succeeded by a disgusted determination that she must be spared ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... are as follow:—"Scene—An ale-house room.—Several shabby fellows with punch and tobacco; Tony at the head of the table, &c., discovered." Never perhaps, in any previous representation, was the mise en scene so perfect. It drew three rounds of applause. A very equivocal compliment to ourselves it may be; but such jolly-looking "shabby fellows" as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their way, as Macready's Roman mob. Then there was no make-believe puffing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... subservience and a slave's quickness in guessing his master's mood. Coupled with these traits, which fit him well for the relation of status—and which must for the present purpose be set down as serviceable traits—the dog has some characteristics which are of a more equivocal aesthetic value. He is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up is a servile, fawning attitude towards his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else. The dog, then, commends himself to our favor ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... he called monads, were continually coming into the world and that there were different kinds of these monads for each primary division of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. This last hypothesis does not seem essentially different from the old doctrine of equivocal or spontaneous generation; it is wholly unsupported by any modern experiments or observation, and therefore affords us no aid whatever in speculating on the commencement of vital phenomena ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... a humorous grimace; and although Dick was displeased to lie under so great favours to so equivocal a personage, he was yet unable to restrain ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... grocer's daughter would think she made a misalliance by marrying a painter, and where a literary man (in spite of all we can say against it) ranks below that class of gentry composed of the apothecary, the attorney, the wine-merchant, whose positions, in country towns at least, are so equivocal. As, for instance, my friend the Rev. James Asterisk, who has an undeniable pedigree, a paternal estate, and a living to boot, once dined in Warwickshire, in company with several squires and parsons of that enlightened county. Asterisk, as usual, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... want to join us tonight?" whispered Capitan Basilio into Ibarra's ear as they were leaving. "Padre Damaso is going to set up a little bank." Ibarra smiled and answered with an equivocal shake ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... comprehension. Even women, who understand men so well for practical purposes, do not know them well enough for the purposes of art. Take even the very best of their male creations, take Tito Melema, for instance, and you will find he has an equivocal air, and every now and again remembers he has a comb at the back of his head. Of course, no woman will believe this, and many men will be so very polite as ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... turn from a recollection of the words to a consideration of the peculiarities of the style of Junius, I think it will be agreed that the most remarkable of all is that species of irony which consists in equivocal compliment. Walpole also excelled in this; and prided himself upon doing so. Are we not justified in saying, that of all who, in the eighteenth century, cast their thoughts on public occurrences into the form of letters, Junius and Walpole are the ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... a less equivocal garb, my dear Joanna," answered the Earl of Mar, rather ashamed of the hasty words which indeed the suspicion of a moment had drawn from his lips; "judge my child by her usual conduct, not by an accidental appearance ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... our own being, which alone—according to this system—we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motion in our own brains. (3) That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation nor precludes the necessity of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which, at the more than magic touch of the impulse from without, creates ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Nevertheless, David did not entirely lose his presence of mind; for in that case he would have sunk on the earth or started backward; whereas he kept his ground and smiled at Jacob, who nodded his head up and down, and said, "Hoich, Zavy!" in a painfully equivocal manner. David's heart was beating audibly, and if he had had any lips they would have been pale; but his mental activity, instead of being paralysed, was stimulated. While he was inwardly praying (he always prayed when he was much frightened)—"Oh, save ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... other. It is frequently said, we are aware, that if God had pardoned the sinner without enforcing the demands of the law, he would have displayed his mercy alone, and not his justice; but in fact this would have been a very equivocal display of mercy. It would have shown only one of two things: either that God regarded the sinner with an eye of compassion, or that he did not regard his sin: either that he was merciful, or that he had no great abhorrence of sin: either ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... leisured stroke, the old euphonious clangour pervaded Oxford, spreading out over the meadows, along the river, audible in Iffley. But to the dim groups gathering and dispersing on either bank, and to the silent workers in the boats, the bell's message came softened, equivocal; came as a requiem for ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... Let there be a fair discussion; remember we fight only with foils, and the point of mine shall be covered with velvet. In your attack upon chemistry, Philalethes, you limited the use of it to the apothecary's shop and the kitchen. The first is an equivocal use; by introducing it into the kitchen you make it an art fundamental to all others. But if what you had stated had really meant to be serious, it would not have deserved a reply; as it is in mere playfulness, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... of rivers, made mere equivocal by every new hypothesis, receives here additional ambiguity. If there were (as Mr. Bowdich affirms) three distinct rivers near Timbuctoo; viz. the 477 Joliba, the Gambarro, and the Niger, (i. e. the Neel El Abeed) how comes it that they have ...
— An Account of Timbuctoo and Housa Territories in the Interior of Africa • Abd Salam Shabeeny
... future diminution of the standard of our accustomed enjoyments; and that we pursue this aim in our saving with the same calm certainty as we do our aim in working. A contradiction between this and what was said just now is found only when you overlook the equivocal meaning of the word "care." We know no "care" so far as a fear concerning the morrow is implied by the word; but our whole public and private life is pervaded by foresight, in the sense of making precautionary arrangements to-day in order that the needs of to-morrow ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... little old gentleman in a fur tippet. He sat with his legs crossed and his hands folded, and a cup of spiced wine stood by his elbow on a bracket on the wall. His countenance had a strong masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were quaintly and almost comically evil in expression. Beautiful white hair hung straight all round ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... judged that victory goes against him whose answers are such that one comprehends nothing in them,' (It is a very equivocal sign of victory: for then one must needs ask the audience if they comprehend anything in what has been said, and often their opinions would be divided. The order of formal disputes is to proceed ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... enemies awakes his self-reproach. His invective turns into panegyric, and he warms for a time into hearty admiration, which proves that his irritation arises from an excess, not from a defect, of sensibility; but finding that he has gone a little too far, he lets his praise slide into equivocal description, and, with some parting epigram, he relapses into silence. The portraits thus drawn are never wanting in piquancy nor in fidelity. Brooding over his injuries and his desertions, Hazlitt has pondered almost with the eagerness of a lover upon the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... outset, the presence which in itself he conceived to be a challenge was to demonstrate itself for this in no equivocal terms. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... substantiates the narrative of Carbuccia by a long account of his personal dealings with Giambattista Pessina, descending into the most curious particulars; he publishes the secret alphabet of the Palladium, specimens of litanies addressed to the good god Lucifer, and hymns of equivocal tendency attributed to Albert Pike. Finally, he fully admits the Satanic character of perfect Masonic initiation, and contributes a long chapter to swell our recent knowledge upon the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... immediate and entire destruction of the works. He did not see the advantage of doing the thing by halves; while the destruction of the sea defences only might give rise to erroneous impressions and would be of an equivocal character. The fall of Sebastopol would in fact be the conquest of the Crimea, and the Allies might winter there with perfect security, as, by occupying the lines of Perekop,[53] any access to the Crimea would effectually be prevented ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... evening, while the doctor was pacing the aisles of St. Rosalie, he was disturbed from his meditation by a heavy military tread and the jingling of spurs, and a man of superior appearance, but equivocal demeanour, strode towards him, and demanded to know if he were Dr. Beaton, the Scotch physician. On receiving an affirmative answer, he was requested to render assistance to some one in need of immediate ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is a monument there which ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... I discovered the Intendant and his friends by ear long before I got sight of them." An equivocal smile accompanied Philibert's words, which the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... income, which henceforth became Philippe's. The exhausted old man and the Rabouilleuse were now plunged by their nephew into the excessive dissipations of the dangerous and restless society of actresses, journalists, artists, and the equivocal women among whom Philippe had already wasted his youth; where old Rouget found excitements that soon after killed him. Instigated by Giroudeau, Lolotte, one of the handsomest of the Opera ballet-girls, was the amiable assassin of the old man. Rouget died after a splendid ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... vernacular school where I was to learn my own thoughts and to receive the heritage of our national culture through the medium of our own literature. I was thus to consider myself one with the people and never to place myself in an equivocal ...
— Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose - His Life and Speeches • Sir Jagadis Chunder Bose
... compelled to bear the malicious jokes of the courtiers. But let us leave Choisy and the experimentalist, and return to Versailles and myself. My friends were excessively desirous for my presentation, which would decide my position at the chateau. As yet I only had an equivocal existence, having rank neither at play, theatre, or public festival; so that if the king should be capricious I could be dismissed as one of the demoiselles of the . The duc d'Aiguillon, whose attachment ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... divinity can once agree that all the forces of the universe, as well as all its power, are immediately dependent upon its Creator,—that He is not only omnipotent but omnimovent,—we have no longer any fear of nebular theories, or doctrines of equivocal generation, or ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... which has to include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of the ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... we wish to believe, we are already greatly in progress to embrace; and that which will bring upon us disgrace and calamity, we are more than half prepared to reject. Persecution however is of very equivocal power: we cannot embrace one faith and reject another at ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... At a dinner at Baron Rothschild's, Careme, the Delmonico of those times, surprised her with a column of ingenious confectionery architecture on which was inscribed her name spun in sugar. It was a more equivocal compliment when Walter Scott christened two pet donkeys Hannah ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... he was most susceptible, and jealous to the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy that everyone who makes any reference to their origin ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... head contemptuously. "Agostino would gather up all such equivocal objects before he showed her the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... alleged results of observation may be set aside; first, because the so-called facts are in their own nature equivocal; secondly, because they stand on insufficient authority; thirdly, because they are not sufficiently numerous. But, in this case, the disease is one of striking and well-marked character; the witnesses are experts, interested ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from the real point at issue by eloquent digressions, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... in rude health felt like an unwarrantable intruder, in which light I am sure the hypochondriacs always regarded him. As such a one passed, you might see a glare, half-envious, half-resentful, light up some hollow eyes, and thin parched lips worked nervously, as though they were uttering a very equivocal blessing. ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... chieftains in his realm as a usurper. He was liable, at any time, on some sudden change of fortune, to be expelled from his dominions. His position, in a word, though for the time being very exalted, was too precarious and unstable, and his personal claims to high social rank were too equivocal, to justify her trusting her destiny in his hands. In a word, Matilda's answer to William's proposals was an absolute ...
— William the Conqueror - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... his own equivocal position in Belvedere, a free boy, a leader afraid of his own authority, proud and sensitive and suspicious, battling against the squalor of his life and against the riot of his mind. The letters cut in the stained wood of the desk stared upon him, mocking his bodily weakness ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... either by going on, or by turning back, or by standing still, would have signified nothing towards proving that she had intended to put an end to her own life and to that of her child. One shudders to think that innocent women may have suffered an ignominous death, from such equivocal proofs and inconclusive reasoning. ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... better things might have been expected. He has taken for his model, Mr. Lloyd's really excellent Field Sports of the North of Europe; but he has woefully missed his mark. The title of the work before us is equivocal: a reader might as reasonably expect the Sports of the Western World, as adventures in Ireland, such as make up the present volumes. What we principally complain of is the paucity of Sports among their contents. It is true that the title also promises Legendary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... fear had passed, and she seemed less concerned about the equivocal situation than a girl should be; at least, this is the way Tom's thought was shaping itself. He tried to imagine Ardea in Nan's place, but the thing was baldly unimaginable. A daughter of the Dabneys would never run and cower and beg to ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... State and national, are finally referred to the constitution, it is of vital importance that that instrument should not be susceptible of a different interpretation from every possible standpoint. It is folly to spend another century in expounding the equivocal language of the constitution. If under that instrument, supposed to be the Magna Charta of American liberties, all United States citizens do not stand equal before the law, it should without further delay be so amended as in plain, unmistakable language to declare what are the rights, privileges, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... These equivocal compliments did not seem to please Hortense. She drew herself up, puckered her black eyebrows, but ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... solitary rudder-like fin; other fish with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned; the tail in every instance among the less equivocal shapes formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination of the fin. All the forms testify of a remote antiquity. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... beneath the portrait, and with the image present to their minds of painter and sitter hasting on their way to be wed, saw this equivocal masterpiece with a difference. Not Aurora alone looked forth from the canvas,—throat of lily, cheek of rose, heaven-blue eyes, smile and ringlets of immitigable sunniness. Gerald, self-depicted in every ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... development of species was in Hallam's words: "There is nothing so small or so unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in it; and this spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a plant or an animal"; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how the modern theories of equivocal generation correspond ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... from precise correctness, the most venial trippings, the smallest inattention paid to doubtful rules and equivocal positions of criticism, inflames their anger, and calls forth their invectives. Regardless of the sage maxims of Cicero, Quintilian, and Horace, they not only disdain the sober rules which their ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... etc. (Vol. 3, p. 1456.) In regard to this, Mr. Madison says, "The term 'legally' was struck out, and the words 'under the laws thereof,' inserted after the word State, in compliance with the wish of some who thought the term 'legally' equivocal and favoring the idea that slavery was legal in a moral ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... to Jack MacRae that his father, pouring out the tale of those troubled years, had bestowed upon him an equivocal heritage. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... utterly alone—all the exaltation gone. For the moment I hated the two down-stairs. I felt the situation equivocal and untenable, and it had amused me so much ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... his, Average Jones' reason lost its balance. He forgot that he was in that house on an equivocal footing; he forgot that he had exposed and disgraced Sylvia Graham's near relative; he forgot that this was but his third meeting with Sylvia Graham herself; he forgot everything except that the sum total of all that was sweetest and finest and most desirable in womanhood stood warm and vivid before ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... little dreamed that he was to anticipate a daughter-in-law in the ward whom he understood Harley, in a freak of generous romance had adopted, was familiar and courteous, as became a host. But he looked upon Helen as a mere child, and naturally left her to the Countess. The dim sense of her equivocal position—of her comparative humbleness of birth and fortunes, oppressed and pained her; and even her gratitude to Harley was made burthensome by a sentiment of helplessness. The grateful long to requite. And what could she ever ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... characteristic (non-coarsely-organic) cases of involutional origin were much given to delusions (each of 24 cases studied), somewhat more so than to the hypochondria and melancholia which we commonly ascribe to the involution period. But this result is equivocal as to the environmental (i. e. allopsychogenic) power to produce delusions, since one could not rid oneself of the suspicion that the delusions were due to ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... their inability to elucidate to the native petty governors the true intent and meaning of the order. At the same time, the Archbishop of Manila issued instructions on the subject to his subordinates in very equivocal language. The native local authorities then petitioned the Civil Governor of Manila to make the matter clear to them. The Civil Governor forthwith referred the matter back to the Director-General of Civil Administration. This functionary, in a new circular ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... skepticism, but he offered to show "the greatest deference to decisions of much higher authority."[9] Tyrwhitt had also hesitated to be dogmatic. He saw fit to suggest that, since Chatterton had always been equivocal, the authenticity of the poems could be judged only on internal grounds. Merely to show what might be gleaned from the poems themselves, he examined "part of the internal evidence," the language, and specifically "apart only of this part, viz. ... words, ...
— Cursory Observations on the Poems Attributed to Thomas Rowley (1782) • Edmond Malone
... calm, that the individual soul feels the presence of those supreme companions whose real and personal existence I have attempted to indicate. These ideal and yet most real companions of humanity make their presence felt by the soul in just the same immediate, direct and equivocal way in which we feel the influence of a friend or lover whose spirit, in his bodily absence, is concentrated upon our spirit, even as ours ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... Frances Stuart, one of the greatest beauties of the court of Charles II, is linked with the history of the Beare. Sad as was the havoc she wrought in the heart of the susceptible Pepys, who is ever torn between admiration of her loveliness and mock-reprobation of her equivocal position at court, Frances Stuart created still deeper passions in men more highly placed than he. Apart from her royal lover, there were two nobles, the Dukes of York and Richmond who contended for her hand, with the result of ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... to Paris by an insolent and ferocious crowd, and looked back with gratitude to the equivocal civilities of Sauce. The journey occupied four days, during which the queen's hair turned grey. Three deputies, sent by the Assembly, met the dolorous procession half way, and took charge of the royal family. The king at once assured them that he had intended to remain ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Then the sudden change in the construction of the last sentence, and the substitution of the name of the person mentioned, for the degree of affinity in which he was supposed to stand to Tom, might be merely a rigid observance of the best tone of society, or it might be equivocal. All these little distinctions gleamed across the mind of Tom Wychecombe; but that was not the moment to pursue the investigation. Courtesy required that he should make an immediate answer, which he succeeded in doing steadily enough as to general ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... their own situation on the morning of the Eve of Saint John is difficult to imagine; for they were in one of those exciting but equivocal situations in which modern financiers not infrequently find themselves. Their feelings might possibly be compared to those of Lord Byron when he had written offers of marriage to two young ladies on the same day, and both accepted him; or to those ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... mentioned, however, my translation may fairly claim to be true to the spirit of the original. Even the strictest moralist will not cavil at seeing equivocal situations painted in Bilse's book when his purpose in doing so has been the radical exposure of ills existing in a body around which cluster so many traditions of honor and duty well done as is the case with the German army. And there is no excuse to be offered ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... word, it is of a nature altogether equivocal and ambiguous, or, rather, it must appear so to those who believe the hypothetical order of their own ideas to be the real order of things, and who see nothing in the infinite chain of existences but a few apparent points to ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... see the wisdom of my concern for your hasty departure when I add that I know all about the little house in Versailles, that my knowledge is shared by the chief of the Parisian police and the minister of war. If you annoy Miss Harrigan with your equivocal attentions...." ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... in the English Garden. But she maintained her claim to being a highly reasonable woman—I could not but admire the justice of this pretension—by recognising my irresponsibility. I had taken her daughter as I found her, which was, according to Mrs. Church's view, in a very equivocal position. The natural instinct of a young man, in such a situation, is not to protest but to profit; and it was clear to Mrs. Church that I had had nothing to do with Miss Aurora's appearing in public under the insufficient chaperonage ...
— The Pension Beaurepas • Henry James
... sure, for to me there was something equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have been, I thought, the son of some good family who had fallen early into dissipation and run from home. But, making every allowance, how admirable was his talk! I wish you could have heard hin, tell his own stories. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the translator felt free to interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of the original Purvey writes: "But in translating of words equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not translated into the sense, either understanding, of the ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Lady Lefevre, "with his equivocal compliments. I shouldn't wonder if he says that, my dear, because you have not yet had more than a word to ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban
... concluding paragraph relating to "curious and carnal persons" shows that the venerable compilers of the Article rejected extreme views of this doctrine, since these only could lead to "a most dangerous downfall." But if the article itself be at all equivocal, it must be interpreted by the formularies of the Church and by the Scriptures, since no dogma is to be imputed to this holy branch of Christ's Catholic Church, that is at variance with the attributes of God, the moral constitution of man, the testimony ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... in the Church by appearing to adopt their views. Sometimes he sided with Hippolytus, and sometimes with those opposed to him; hence it is that the theology taught in these letters is of a very equivocal character. Dr. Lightfoot has seized upon this fact as a reason that they are never quoted by Irenaeus. "The language approaching dangerously near to heresy might," says he, "have led him to avoid directly quoting the doctrinal teaching." [76:1] A much better reason was that he had never heard ...
— The Ignatian Epistles Entirely Spurious • W. D. (William Dool) Killen
... lesson; the next time you see a gentleman coming along, turn out of the way for him, and you'll save your new clothes." Without another glance at the discomfited beau, who was brushing his plaid pantaloons with his pocket-handkerchief, and muttering some equivocal language that would not do here, he went on his way to see the improvements ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... ridiculous pretence of being "noble" by family, seems to claim for obscure foreigners some sort of advantage over the plain untitled Englishman; but eternally the travelled Englishman recollects, that, so far as this equivocal "nobility" had been really fenced with privileges, those have been long in a course of superannuation; whilst the counter-vailing advantages for his own native aristocracy are precisely those which time or ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... rival, aimed at her absolute ruin, though she had broken no treaties. The Carthaginians, broken-hearted, sent embassy after embassy, imploring the Senate to preserve peace, to whom the senators gave equivocal answers. The situation of Carthage was hopeless and miserable—stripped by Masinissa of the rich towns of Emporia, and on the eve of another conflict with ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... in spite of his cold impassivity beginning to lose command of himself, while Lindsay was giving still more noisy and less equivocal signs of impatience, "madam, all these discussions are beside our aim: I beg you to return to it, then, and inform us if, your life and honour guaranteed, you consent to abdicate the ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... them, the leading points in the history or character of persons of whom they have no previous knowledge, they at the same time persuade themselves that they see something indicative of their circumstances in their finger nails. Such is the equivocal character of the greater part of their sect: but there are some who are mere honest dupes to the pretensions of the science; and others again, who have not one tittle of credulity ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... an entire accordance with the fitness of things is a question no doubt capable of being debated. Me the situation strikes, I must confess, as a little grotesque. The layman in the wide sense, the amateur, always occupies a rather equivocal position when he addresses experts and the profession; but his position is never so equivocal as when he doubles the part of non-expert with that of candid friend. How Mr Arnold succeeded in this exceedingly delicate attempt I do not propose to examine at any length. He ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the relations existing between Zinaida and Count Malevsky. He was handsome, clever, and adroit, but something equivocal, something false in him was apparent even to me, a boy of sixteen, and I marvelled that Zinaida did not notice it. But possibly she did notice this element of falsity really and was not repelled by it. Her irregular education, strange acquaintances and habits, ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... so far do I know thee! Thou must ever be equivocal, trivocal, quadrivocal, and quinquivocal! Even what thou hast now confessed, is not nearly true enough ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... detect an air of equivocal bonhomie upon the countenance of the sergeant; but the adventure of the vault might have excited the curiosity of the man, and it was not surprising that he allowed some of the feelings which agitated his mind to appear in his face. Athos closed the doors carefully, confiding the ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of which I speak, Tom Hopkins was of an age somewhat equivocal; public fame called him fifty, whilst he himself stuck obstinately at thirty-five; of a stout active figure, rather manly than gentlemanly, and a bold, jovial visage, in excellent keeping with his person, distinguished by round, bright, stupid black eyes, an ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 340, Supplementary Number (1828) • Various
... come merely with a design to gratify it, and only expect you will judge of my desire to oblige you by my readiness in obeying your commands; were I myself the subject, the motive for my obedience might be equivocal.' ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... vain. The Duchess ordered the archives of the province to be searched for precedents, and the council to report upon the petition. The case was too plain for argument or dogmatism, but the attempt was made to take refuge in obscurity. The answer of the council was hesitating and equivocal. The Duchess insisted upon a distinct and categorical answer to the four cities. Thus pressed, the council of Brabant declared roundly that no inquisition of any kind had ever existed, in the provinces. It was impossible ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... that cases are known of boys of fifteen or so resorting to self-mutilation, to save themselves from the temptations of early manhood. These apostles of purity do not always scruple to have recourse to violence or deceit. They ensnare their victims by equivocal forms of speech, and having thus obtained their consent virtually upon false pretences, they reveal to the confiding dupes the real meaning of the engagement they have entered into only at the last moment, when it is too late ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... significant clash of arms and roll of drums from the mustered garrison outside—in the normal manner; and after a solemn warning from the commandant that vengeance would follow any act of aggression, the council broke up. To the forest leader's equivocal announcement that he would bring all of his wives and children in a few days to shake hands with their English ...
— The Old Northwest - A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond, Volume 19 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Frederic Austin Ogg
... accumulation of the previous day from the steps of the front door. "Milk below," (certainly much below "proof"), was answered by the assent of the busy cooks, when a knock at the door of Mrs Smith's room from the red knuckles of the housemaid, awoke her to a sense of her equivocal situation. ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... blushes her virtue is safe. In this way girls who have themselves had experience of the marriage bed are said to detect the virgin. The virgin's eyes are cast down and almost motionless, while she who has known a man has eyes that are bright and quick. But this sign is equivocal, says Schurig, for girls are different, and can simulate the modesty they do not feel. Yet this indication also rests on a fundamentally sound psychological basis. (See "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume of ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of the Caqueta coming from the south-east, and that the Rio Negro issued immediately from it. (* See the classical memoir of this great geographer in the Journal des Savans, March 1750 page 184. "One fact," says D'Anville, "which cannot be considered as equivocal, after the proofs with which we have been recently furnished, is the communication of the Rio Negro with the Orinoco; but we must not hesitate to admit, that we are not yet sufficiently informed of the manner in which this communication takes place." I was ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... lying, sloth, and disobedience, should be 'with sharp chastisement daily cut away.' {418a} 'A woman will have her will' was, among Elizabethan wags, an exceptionally popular proverbial phrase, the point of which revolved about the equivocal meaning of the last word. The phrase supplied the title of 'a pleasant comedy,' by William Haughton, which—from 1597 onwards—held the stage for the unusually prolonged period of forty years. 'Women, because they ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... the merry voices beneath her window. The Chevalier was making equivocal jokes, foreign witticisms, vulgar and clumsy. She listened, in despair. Servigny, just a bit tipsy, was imitating the common workingman, calling the Marquise "the Missus." And all of a sudden he said to Saval: "Well, Boss?" That caused a ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... of frequent and intricate discussions, sufficiently denoting the indeterminate limits by which they are respectively circumscribed. All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions ...
— The Federalist Papers
... excuse for convoking a general meeting of the associates which consequently took place at the town of St. Trond, in the district of Liege. Full two thousand of the members appeared on the summons. The language held in this assembly was much stronger and less equivocal than that formerly used. The delay in the arrival of the king's answer presaged ill as to his intentions; while the rapid growth of the public power seemed to mark the present as the time for successfully demanding all that the people required. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... I had not supposed that any of them denied its sinfulness. It is true, that a large proportion of them refuse to take a stand against it. Let them justify to their consciences, and to their God, as they can, the equivocal silence and still more equivocal action on this subject, by which they have left their Southern brethren to infer, that Northern piety sanctions slavery. It is the doctrine of expediency, so prevalent and corrupting in the American Church, which has deceived you into the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... architects, masons, and painters are generally quicker to see and better able to estimate distances correctly, proves that the fault is not in our eyes, but in our use of them. Their occupations give them the training we lack, and they check the equivocal results of the angle of vision by its accompanying experiences, which determine the relations of the two causes of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... of the two hypotheses just described, the latter is the only one which is not equivocal. The Darwinian idea of adaptation by automatic elimination of the unadapted is a simple and clear idea. But, just because it attributes to the outer cause which controls evolution a merely negative influence, it has great difficulty in ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... more agreeable. That is to say, she was CHATTY; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea. She became EXCESSIVELY intimate with most of the ladies; and, to my profound astonishment, evinced no equivocal disposition to coquet with the men. She amused us all very much. I say "amused"—and scarcely know how to explain myself. The truth is, I soon found that Mrs. W. was far oftener laughed AT than WITH. The gentlemen said little ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... had told him in her soft, sweet voice, he asked himself if she had not really been slandered; and, if there was actually something amiss in her past life, why should it not rather be laid at the door of those two equivocal personages who watched over her, M. Elgin and ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... class of persons who are modest in words, but not in deeds, who are offended at the talk, while they delight in the acts. We hear them utter cries of horror and indignation at the slightest equivocal word, we see them stop their ears at the recital of a racy tale, chastely cover their face before the figure of the Callipygean Venus, treating Moliere as obscene and Rabelais as debauched; yet, out of sight, sheltered by the curtains ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... destination. The breeze was steady, but light, and the passage was a delightful one through the narrow channels among the islands. The skipper got up a nice dinner of beefsteak, green corn, and tomatoes, which Mr. Hines declared was equal to the table at the Bay View; and this was no equivocal compliment. ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... things, and occasionally "showed her head" (a term in the lexicon of such characters) in the Bois, where the fashionable young men of the day began to remark her. In fact, before long Malaga was very much talked about in the questionable world of equivocal women, who presently attacked her good fortune by calumnies. They said she was a somnambulist, and the Pole was a magnetizer who was using her to discover the philosopher's stone. Some even more envenomed scandals drove her to a curiosity that was greater than Psyche's. ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... always had rather a mean opinion of the Captain, and now began to think his courage was somewhat equivocal. "What is it I can do for you, Dobbin?" he ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... dreams of advancement and renown. For my own part I candidly confess, that though I had just cause to look forward to a return to the bosom of my family with as much satisfaction as most men, the restoration of peace excited in me sensations of a very equivocal nature. At the age of eighteen, and still enthusiastically attached to my profession, neither the prospect of a reduction to half-pay, nor the expectation of a long continuance in a subaltern situation, were to me productive of ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... mysterious man you are.' 'Ay, ay!' observes Mr. Fairfax, 'Indeed!' Now Mr. Fairfax says this ay, ay, and indeed, which are slight words enough in themselves, with so very unfathomable an air, and accompanies them with such a very equivocal smile, that ma and the young ladies are more than ever convinced that he means an immensity, and so tell him he is a very dangerous man, and seems to be always thinking ill of somebody, which is precisely the sort of character the censorious young gentleman is most desirous to establish; wherefore ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... There was an equivocal smile on the face of nearly every one present as they looked at the Member of Congress and awaited his reply. What that would have been they never knew, because just at that moment entered Mr. Sefton, breathing peace and good will. He had ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... more curiously a weak spot in Hooker's character than the odd pride he took in Mr. Lincoln's somewhat equivocal letter to him at the time ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... more serious thoughts occasionally find expression in its pages, and he even introduces himself under the imperfect anagram of Philisides, and shadows forth his friendship with the French humanist Languet. More than this it would be rash to assert, and Greville did his friend an equivocal service when he sought to find a deep philosophy underlying the rather formal characters of the romance[148]. These characters, as we have seen, are for the most part essentially courtly; the pastoral guise is a mere veil shielding them from the crude uncompromising light of actuality, with its ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... because Shakespeare's early life was incompatible with a course of Education—whose Contemporaries, Friends and Foes, nay, and himself likewise, agree in his want of what is usually called Literature—whose mistakes from equivocal Translations, and even typographical Errors, cannot possibly be accounted for otherwise,—that Locke, to whom not one of these circumstances is applicable, understood no Greek?—I suspect, Rollin's Opinion of our Philosopher was not founded ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the error of not only approving the advice of that equivocal monitor, but the greater error of following it. Experience came very soon to open ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... by Waterland, by Whiston, by Blackburne, and by some of the more ardent Calvinists, was strong, and felt to be so. In appearance, if not in reality, there was clearly something equivocal, some appearance of casuistry and reserve, if not of insincerity, in subscribing to formularies, part of which were no longer accepted in the spirit in which they had been drawn up, and with the meaning they had been originally intended to bear. The Deistical ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... the mother of a little girl; while Emma and Mrs. Weston were enabled to take a more lenient view of Frank Churchill's conduct, thanks to a long letter which he wrote to the latter lady in which he apologised for his equivocal conduct to Emma, and expressed his regret that those attentions should have caused such poignant distress to the lady whom he was shortly to make his wife. The much discussed pianoforte had been ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... insist on, nor reiterate, the decadence of the Palais Royal. It is no longer the "capitol of Paris," and whatever its charms may be they are mostly equivocal. It is more a desert than an oasis or a temple de la volupte, and it was each of these things in other days. Its priestesses and its gambling houses are gone, and who shall say this of itself is not a good thing in spite of the ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... prejudices—the Bill for enabling a man to marry his deceased wife's sister. The devoted adversaries of the Contagious Diseases Act will spread through the length and breadth of the land a salutary discussion of this equivocal measure and of all matters connected with it; and will thus, at the same time that they oppose immorality, enable the followers of even the very straitest sects of Puritanism to see life." All these various attempts to break down the "hedge of the law" received in turn their merited condemnation; ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... sea, on the other maps, is, as already observed, an open sea, extending westerly from the isthmus in latitude 40 Degrees, without intervening land, uninterruptedly to India. The intention of the delineation of this portion of the map, is not equivocal. For the first time, on any map, there is found upon it the name of Francisca, which is placed above the parallel of 50 Degrees N. latitude and above that of C. Britonum, designated thus by name, in the proper position of Cape Breton. It is placed between the ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... wearier that we made a detour and went out of our way to seek for Professor Parker's thermometer, which he had left "in a crack on the west side of the last boulder of the northeast ridge." That sounds definite enough, yet in fact it is equivocal. "Which is the last boulder?" we disputed as we went down the slope. A long series of rocks almost in line came to an end, with one rock a little below the others, a little out of the line. This egregious boulder ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... enormities towards which precedents travel." And the people of the United States, as we have seen, appealed to the last argument, rather than acquiesce in their authority. Could it have been the purpose of Washington and his illustrious associates, by the use of ambiguous, equivocal, and expansive words, such as "rules," "regulations," "territory," to re-establish in the Constitution of their country that fort which had been prostrated amid the toils and with the sufferings and sacrifices of ...
— Report of the Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof, in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F.A. Sandford • Benjamin C. Howard
... gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein's intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be "queer" and "different," to respond to pass-words and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. She must make the best of what she could get and wait her ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... fine, but led to a different ending from what either anticipated. The "lady" who acted as "alcahuete" soon placed herself en rapport with Rosita; but her success was more equivocal than that of Vizcarra himself; in fact, I should rather say unequivocal, for there ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid
... expressions of M. Philarete Chasles, "at the moment even of his embarkation men did not believe in his promises, they were suspicious of his exaggerations, and dreaded the results of an expedition directed by a man so fool-hardy, and of a morality so equivocal." ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part I. The Exploration of the World • Jules Verne
... are not so much logical as economic: what I now wish the reader to attend to—is the blunder involved in the question itself; because that blunder is not economic, but logical. The question is—what is the measure of value? I say then that the phrase—'measure of value' is an equivocal phrase; and, in Mr. Malthus's use of it, means indifferently that which determines value, in relation to the principium essendi, and that which determines value, in relation to the principium cognoscendi. Here, perhaps, the reader will exclaim—'Avoid, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... Though at the age of forty, she is, I assure you, very far from being cold and insensible; her fire may be covered with ashes, but it is not extinguished.—Don't be deceived, my dear, by that prudish and sanctified air.—Warm devotions is no equivocal mark of warm passions; besides, I know it is a fact, (of which I have proofs in hand, which I will tell you by word of mouth) that our learned and holy prude is exceedingly disposed to use the means, supposed in the ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... member, he used to appear in a black coat and knee-breeches, with a ruffled shirt, white waistcoat, and white silk stockings. He was the Chairman of the Whig Senatorial caucus, and on the last night of the extra session Mr. Clay had complimented him, in rather equivocal language, on the ability with which he had presided. When the laughter had subsided, Senator Dixon rose, and with inimitable humor thanked the Senator from Kentucky. "I am aware," said he, "that I never had but one equal as a presiding officer, and that was the Senator from ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... take a sentimental interest, as you pass through the village, in the loves of a needy cripple whose utmost industry has but served to save himself from parish relief, and a giddy girl without a sixpence, and you ask me to accept these very equivocal tenants instead of substantial ones, and at a rent one-third less than the market value. Suppose that I yielded to your request, what becomes of my reputation for practical, business-like justice? I shall have made an inroad into the system ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... however, that the translator felt free to interchange words indiscriminately. Of his treatment of the original Purvey writes: "But in translating of words equivocal, that is, that hath many significations under one letter, may lightly be peril, for Austin saith in the 2nd. book of Christian Teaching, that if equivocal words be not translated into the sense, either understanding, of the author, it is error; as in that ...
— Early Theories of Translation • Flora Ross Amos
... Some neither can for wits nor critics pass, As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass. Those half-learn'd witlings, numerous in our isle, 40 As half-form'd insects on the banks of Nile; Unfinished things, one knows not what to call, Their generation's so equivocal: To tell 'em would a hundred tongues require, Or one vain wit's, that might ...
— The Poetical Works Of Alexander Pope, Vol. 1 • Alexander Pope et al
... thought so much about her equivocal position that her future troubled her. If there was just enough money to give her a college education, she wanted to know it. If she must prepare herself for taking some place at the end of her schooldays in the work-a-day world, she ...
— A Little Miss Nobody - Or, With the Girls of Pinewood Hall • Amy Bell Marlowe
... young woman of twenty. Such a fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. There she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked growing ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... curiously a weak spot in Hooker's character than the odd pride he took in Mr. Lincoln's somewhat equivocal letter to him at the time of his appointment, ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... of dancers. In these, as at the New Tivoli, lately opened at Chateau Rouge in the suburbs, a broad space made smooth for the purpose is left between tents, where the young grisettes of Paris, married and unmarried, or in that equivocal state which lies somewhere between, dance on ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... enlightenment and good feeling, and to help the unfortunate. But it is also incumbent upon us to remember carefully, what is so often overlooked in the denunciations of competition, that the end for which we must hope, and the approach to which we must further, is one in which the equivocal virtue of charity shall be suppressed; that is, in which no man shall be dependent upon his neighbour in such a sense as to be able to neglect his own duties; in which there may be normally a reciprocity of good services, and the reciprocity not be (as has been said) all on one side. There ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... about vigorously. Life indeed was loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... not wait for a second glance at that dreadful apparition, but descended from his equivocal position much more rapidly than ...
— Viking Boys • Jessie Margaret Edmondston Saxby
... days, the affair of the Rue de Provence had been the universal topic of conversation; and friends and enemies were alike glad to seize this opportunity of approaching the banker, some to tender their sympathy, and others to offer equivocal condolence, which of all things is ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... quarrel with curiosity; so far from complaining of yours, I am come merely with a design to gratify it, and only expect you will judge of my desire to oblige you by my readiness in obeying your commands; were I myself the subject, the motive for my obedience might be equivocal.' ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... of the immediate and entire destruction of the works. He did not see the advantage of doing the thing by halves; while the destruction of the sea defences only might give rise to erroneous impressions and would be of an equivocal character. The fall of Sebastopol would in fact be the conquest of the Crimea, and the Allies might winter there with perfect security, as, by occupying the lines of Perekop,[53] any access to the Crimea would effectually be prevented by land. Lord Aberdeen thought that with ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... include the actors and the observations of the author's vagabond life. To a clear and unprejudiced mind, observation of the life of the common folk and, above all, of the itinerant population and of their equivocal moral code, of necessity and invariably, compels resort to the form and manner of ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... join in any unprovoked attack upon Germany. Aggression upon Germany is not the subject and forms no part of any treaty, understanding, or combination to which Britain is now a party, nor will she become a party to anything that has such an object." There is nothing ambiguous or equivocal about that. ["Hear, hear!"] ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... not yet unhorsed. The Jewish police-officers, though they allowed coach-gentry to enter and take up their quarters where they pleased, did not fail to pry into their affairs the next day, as well for the protection of the Jewish community against equivocal intruders as in accordance with its responsibility to ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... His condemnation of the building restrictions paved the way for the fearless agitation of Dr. William Carson. A distinguished medical graduate of Edinburgh, Carson incurred the dislike of Governor Duckworth, and his successor, Governor Keats, by his outspoken pamphlets. Indeed, there was nothing equivocal in Carson's views: ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... state exists precisely opposed to it. The indications of distention of the liver, clearly perceived in some cases, have been pain, tenderness, and sense of distention, in the right hypochondrium, and, what is less equivocal than these, very considerable swelling and prominence of the liver. The inflammation of its tunic is an effect of this distention and of the consequent ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... provided only that the evidence was relevant to the issue raised by the indictment, and that if an overt act was proved "in the course of the whole evidence," that would be sufficient. The day following the Court read an opinion which is a model of ambiguous and equivocal statement, but the purport was fairly clear: for the moment the Court would not interfere, and the prosecution was free to proceed as it thought best, with the warning that the Damocles sword of "irrelevancy" was suspended over its head by the barest thread and ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... been committed. All engaged in it, including the victim, were foreigners. There was not a redeeming feature, not even the rather equivocal one of passion's frenzy, connected with the deed. It was deliberate, long-concerted, mercenary, atrocious, and bloody. The murderers—there were two—were shortly afterwards arrested; tried, convicted, and sentenced to death, with a dispatch and inexorableness ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... Germany—though, in view of the fact that it was conditional on the abandonment of the greater part of the rest of the Treaty, it could hardly be regarded as a serious one.[143] But the German Delegation would have done better if they had stated in less equivocal language how far they felt ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... of his cold impassivity beginning to lose command of himself, while Lindsay was giving still more noisy and less equivocal signs of impatience, "madam, all these discussions are beside our aim: I beg you to return to it, then, and inform us if, your life and honour guaranteed, you consent to abdicate ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Burgersdicius!—does it follow, because Shakespeare's early life was incompatible with a course of Education—whose Contemporaries, Friends and Foes, nay, and himself likewise, agree in his want of what is usually called Literature—whose mistakes from equivocal Translations, and even typographical Errors, cannot possibly be accounted for otherwise,—that Locke, to whom not one of these circumstances is applicable, understood no Greek?—I suspect, Rollin's Opinion of our Philosopher was not founded on ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... rose, when I concluded. And with a manful brevity he replied that he submitted because it was the will of the Lord, and because he had no right to interpose his selfish love and yearnings between the people of God and their worldly opportunity. The others followed. Not one referred to the equivocal language of the manifesto or questioned it. They accepted it—as it was then and afterwards interpreted—as a revelation from God made through the Prophet of the Church; and they subscribed to it as a solemn covenant, before God, with the people ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... hideous malignity. It was seldom that he saw him either following him in the streets, or entering any house or church after him; he only appeared in his place, George wist not how, or whence; and, having sped so ill in his first friendly approaches, he had never spoken to his equivocal ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... partly from Uncle Johnston's sense of waggery keeping him from telling his friend of the gray's last exploit at Hartree Mill, or her leaping over the "best man" at Thriepland, my father was the last to hear of this equivocal glory of "the minister's meer." Indeed, it was whispered she had once won a whip at Lanark races. They still tell of his feats on this fine creature, one of which he himself never alluded to without a feeling of shame. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... conceived the notion of pulling the irrigation project down in ruins at the moment of Weir's own fall. Judge Gordon a few days later had pieced out the method, which was either to corrupt the workmen to wreck dam and camp or to place them in the equivocal position of having done so apparently though others did it in fact. Vorse and Burkhardt devised the details. Weir should be left free until the blow had fallen on the camp, whereupon he should be immediately clapped into jail on the murder charge, which, coming on top of the "riot," would paralyze ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... shabby fellows with punch and tobacco; Tony at the head of the table, &c., discovered." Never perhaps, in any previous representation, was the mise en scene so perfect. It drew three rounds of applause. A very equivocal compliment to ourselves it may be; but such jolly-looking "shabby fellows" as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their way, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the explanation of the symbolical language of this recipe; though we cannot agree with him in supposing Theophilus to have so understood it. We have no doubt the monk wrote what he had heard in good faith, and with no equivocal meaning; and we are even ourselves much disposed to regret and resist the transformation of toads into nitrates of potash, and of basilisks into ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... Rosenberg said to me, as we went down stairs, that Madame de Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret, 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the intensity of her need, she had made small account of convenances. But she acknowledged that a half truth had nearly compassed destruction of her hopes and the ruin of a man; a liar had taken advantage of an equivocal position. But now the whole truth about her was clear. Her identity was known—her motives were beyond all question. And there were no vindictive liars among those loyal followers who had come storming down the river for the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... lucid as their climate and was a perfect expression of the sharp hard logical outlook fostered by that climate, had but one word for those two things. Nor have their equally acute descendants done what might have been expected of them in this matter. Hate and spite are as mysteriously equivocal as hopes. By weight of all this authority I find myself being dragged to the conclusion that a host and a guest must be the same thing, after all. Yet in a dim and muzzy way, deep down in my breast, I feel sure that they are different. Compromise, you see, as usual. ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the "world," which is the essential condition of great things and of great originality. He pardoned a rich man, but only when the rich man, in consequence of some prejudice, was disliked by society.[1] He greatly preferred men of equivocal life and of small consideration in the eyes of the orthodox leaders. "The publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you. For John came unto you and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him."[2] We can understand how galling the reproach ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... exposition—strange as the proceeding appears to us—as short and as clear as the most admirable literary skill could contrive. That eccentric ambition dominates the writings of the times. In a purely literary direction it is illustrated by the famous but curiously rambling and equivocal controversy about the Ancients and Moderns begun in France by Perrault and Boileau. In England the most familiar outcome was Swift's Battle of the Books, in which he struck out the famous phrase about sweetness and light, 'the two noblest of things'; which he illustrated by ridiculing ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... her husband when he knows the truth, and the perfidious meanness with which he makes her the reluctant instrument of her lover's ruin, win back for her much of our alienated sympathy. Yet at the close her position is curiously equivocal. It is at her prayer that Bussy has spared Montsurry when "he hath him down" in the final struggle; but when her lover is mortally wounded by a pistol shot, she implores his pardon for her share in bringing him to his doom. And when the ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... cloudless, unclouded, undimmed; clarion, sonorous, resonant, canorous, audible, piercing; pure, unmixed, unadulterated, unalloyed; in full, net; passable, unimpeded, unobstructed, open; acquitted; unburdened, exempt; clarified. Antonyms: opaque, obscure, indecipherable, ambiguous, equivocal, vague, cryptic, abstruse, inexplicable, roily, turbid, enigmatical, inexplicit, inaudible, adulterated, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... since Miss Gibson has made herself acquainted with this much, we had better let her know the whole truth—that you are engaged to marry me as soon as you are twenty; otherwise your being here with me, and by appointment too, may appear strange, even equivocal to her.' ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... is the basal element in the laughable? What common ground can we find between the grimace of a merry-andrew, a play upon words, an equivocal situation in a burlesque and a scene of high comedy? What method of distillation will yield us invariably the same essence from which so many different products borrow either their obtrusive odour or their delicate perfume? The greatest ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... history, and it resulted in cumbrous ineffectiveness. Interminable inquiry and discussion ended frequently only in suspension of judgment or a divided report. Points of policy of imminent importance had to await a dilatory investigation and equivocal conclusions. This impotence of the central organs of government did not come in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella and their immediate successors, and the growing inefficiency of the councils was ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney
... definite ideas, as an essential of proper study, and of understanding what is read, cannot be exaggerated. Without it one cannot acquire more than a partial knowledge, and one is always liable to those errors of reasoning which arise from the use of equivocal language, which may lead us unconsciously from one meaning of a word to another—a logical error which is perhaps the most fruitful cause of ...
— How to Study • George Fillmore Swain
... that referred to business matters in Prince Edward Island; and becoming annoyed at Plaisted's equivocal answers, Mr. Sherwood took the copy of the letter Dexie had brought home with her, and laid it before his eyes. Plaisted read it with a ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... portrait, and with the image present to their minds of painter and sitter hasting on their way to be wed, saw this equivocal masterpiece with a difference. Not Aurora alone looked forth from the canvas,—throat of lily, cheek of rose, heaven-blue eyes, smile and ringlets of immitigable sunniness. Gerald, self-depicted in every subtle brush-stroke, ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... behind me said in a nasty equivocal tone: "I hope you are satisfied with her, Captain." I did not even turn my head. It was the master of the steamer, and whatever he meant, whatever he thought of her, I knew that, like some rare women, she was one of those creatures whose ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... fact of the adventure was flagrant between them; they had looked at each other, on gaining the street, as people look who have just rounded together a dangerous corner, and there was therefore already enough unanimity sketched out to have lighted, for her companion, anything equivocal in her action. But the amount of light men did need!—Kate could have been eloquent at this moment about that. What, however, on his seeing more, struck him as most distinct in her was her sense that, reunited after his absence ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... Celio Malespini a spy and reporter was no more in the thought of the Prince than it could have been in Celio's performance. He was young, and as chivalric an admirer of the Princess as he was loyal in his devotion to her husband. Had he discovered anything equivocal in her conduct, wild horses could not have torn her secret from him, and it is possible that the Prince counted upon this when ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... tried; but though strongly recommended by the commodore of the beachcombers, in the end they were invariably told by the captains to whom they applied that they bore an equivocal character ashore, and would not answer. So often were they repulsed that we pretty nearly gave up all thoughts of leaving the island in this way; and growing domestic again, settled ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... he, then, prepared to make himself responsible for this young creature's future? Of course she could not remain longer in a position so dangerous and equivocal. But why should she not be reasonable? It was true that Nanna was quite capable of managing the boat; he had only to assist them to get away and give the word to Ulick that he might follow. Ulick would go to the end of the world to ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... fundamental facts of morphological science, biological and psychological, Semon proves that Hering's idea is more than an analogy, and that there is a fundamental identity in the mechanism of organic life. In order to avoid the terminology of psychology which tends to be equivocal, Semon employs some new terms to designate his new ideas, based on the fundamental conception of irritation in ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... thing that is beginning help being revolutionary? Those who are the first to cry out are alone, and therefore ignored or despised. You yourself just said so. But posterity will remember the vanguard of martyrs. It will hail those who have cast a doubt on the equivocal word 'fatherland,' and will gather them into the fold of all the innovators who went before them and who are now ...
— The Inferno • Henri Barbusse
... Market, and Socrates Market, and Solomon Market, but for the patriotism of the town, which has forbidden it from going out of the hemisphere, in quest of names to illustrate. Bacon Market would doubtless have been too equivocal to be tolerated, under any circumstances. Then Bacon was a rogue, though a philosopher, and markets are always appropriated to honest people. At all events, I am rejoiced the reproach of having a market called "The Bear" ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... countess did not exactly receive people notoriously tainted. She was too clever to commit such a blunder; but she bestowed her sweetest smiles upon all those equivocal Bohemians who represent all races, and whose revenues come much less from good acres in the broad sunlight than from the credulity and stupidity ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... 'I cannot deny that I have seen him often and with pleasure; but I have always treated him as a child, and my affection for him was truly that of a sister. In many cases I have given him good advice; and, instead of instigating him to any equivocal action, I have hindered him from taking part in wanton tricks, which might ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... different personal paste of the two ladies, and that the usual feminine hypocrisies would cost them on either side much more than the usual effort. Mrs. Ambient, smooth-haired, thin-lipped, perpetually fresh, must have regarded her crumpled and dishevelled visitor as an equivocal joke; she herself so the opposite of a Rossetti, she herself a Reynolds or a Lawrence, with no more far-fetched note in her composition than a cold ladylike candour and ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... who made remarks in French in Molly's presence which that young lady could not understand, and felt that it was not intended she should. She even regarded with a certain veneration the cap itself, which she had once met in equivocal circumstances, journeying with a plait of white hair towards ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Witt, a descendant of the Grand Pensionary of Holland, who was governor of the place, received his noble visiter with every mark of attention. The Count, however, no sooner beheld Sophia, than he became deeply enamoured of her; and on learning the equivocal situation in which she stood, being neither a slave nor a mistress, but, as it were, a piece of merchandize purchased for 1,500 piastres, he wound up his declaration of love by an offer of marriage. The Count was a handsome ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 379, Saturday, July 4, 1829. • Various
... "devil-may-careism" as prime badges of genius, and he proceeded accordingly to astonish the natives, many of whom, in their turn, set themselves to copy his faults. But when we subtract some half-dozen pieces, either coarse in language or equivocal in purpose, the influence of his poetry may be considered good. (We of course say nothing here of the volume called the "Merry Muses," still extant to disgrace his memory.) It is doubtful if his "Willie brew'd a peck o' Maut" ever made a drunkard, but it ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... who had been enjoying this cross-examination of my equivocal friend, now laughed outright, and heartily did I join in the guffaw: they were to "the manner born," and it was my puzzled expression that so tickled them; to me, after the first surprise was over, the whole thing was indescribably ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... somewhat equivocal form of expression, that flagellation was threatened, Taddy obeyed, still feeling ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... The equivocal and ambiguous position in which the Unionists placed themselves in the course of this episode is a striking commentary on the impossibility of governing a country against its will. The Tories tried ...
— Ireland and the Home Rule Movement • Michael F. J. McDonnell
... Jean-Jacques signed the transfer of the income, which henceforth became Philippe's. The exhausted old man and the Rabouilleuse were now plunged by their nephew into the excessive dissipations of the dangerous and restless society of actresses, journalists, artists, and the equivocal women among whom Philippe had already wasted his youth; where old Rouget found excitements that soon after killed him. Instigated by Giroudeau, Lolotte, one of the handsomest of the Opera ballet-girls, was the amiable assassin of the old man. Rouget died after a splendid supper at ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... drawn from the assemblage around me. With some difficulty I was permitted to reach my much admired steed, and with a cheer, which was sustained and caught up by every denizen of the village as I passed through, I rode on my way, not a little amused at my equivocal popularity. ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... early opportunity of questioning him concerning his intentions towards my child: he gave an equivocal answer, and I forbade ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... mixture has resulted a character equivocal and ambiguous, but peculiarly Porto Rican. The heat of the climate has made them lazy, to which end also the fertility of the soil has conduced; the solitary life of the country residents has rendered them morose ...
— Porto Rico - Its History, Products and Possibilities... • Arthur D. Hall
... believe most of my readers would be long in conjecturing what possible advantage could ever fall to our share. However, it is certain, that all the regular seeds of party and faction among us are entirely rooted out, and if any new ones shall spring up, they must be of equivocal generation, without any seed at all; and will justly be imputed to a degree of stupidity beyond even what we have been ever charged with upon the score of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... being devoid of sense, or from being common, or contrary, or unnecessary, and a corrupt style consists principally in impropriety of words, in their redundancy, in their obscure import, in a weak composition, and in a puerile hunting after synonymous or equivocal words. But every perverse affectation is false in consequence of its idea, tho not everything that is false is an affectation, the latter saying a thing otherwise than as nature will have it, and than it ought to be, and ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... insinuation, and above all, his readiness of pen, were deemed of no small utility, in promoting the union of the two kingdoms; of which he wrote an able history, in 1709, with two dedications, one to the Queen, and another to the Duke of Queensbury. Soon afterwards he unhappily, by some equivocal writings, rendered himself suspected by both parties, so that he once more retired to Newington in hopes of spending the remainder of his days in peace. His pension being withdrawn, and wearied with politics, he began to compose works of a different kind.—The ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... furnished with a mattress and bedding, and hooked to the ceiling by a very suspiciously slender cord. Direful are the ruminations and exclamations of inexperienced travellers, particularly young ones, as they eye these very equivocal accommodations. "What, sleep up there! I won't sleep on one of those top shelves, I know. The cords will certainly break." The chambermaid here takes up the conversation, and solemnly assures them that such an accident is not to be thought of at all; that it is a natural impossibility—a ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... the queen were assembled. I will not attempt to describe what took place, after the interesting account given by Captain Fitz Roy. The money, it appeared, had not been paid; perhaps the alleged reasons were rather equivocal; but otherwise I cannot sufficiently express our general surprise at the extreme good sense, the reasoning powers, moderation, candour, and prompt resolution, which were displayed on all sides. I believe we all left the meeting with a very different opinion of the Tahitians, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... parents who think her taste for worldly pleasures is greater than it should be. She is expected by her cousin Lescaut, a Garde du Corps, and while he is looking for her luggage, the young beauty is accosted by Guillot-Marfontaine, an old roue, and rich farmer, who annoys her with his equivocal speeches, and offers her a seat in his carriage. He is quickly driven away by Lescaut on his return; the young man is however enticed away by his comrades to play a game of cards, for which purpose he leaves his cousin a second time. Before long another cavalier approaches Manon; this time it is ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... blithely, "as you are a stranger, a man of high and irreproachable honor, sans peur et sans reproche—and one, I know, who will not place me in an equivocal position here in my home by divulging my true position—I don't mind telling you, in all confidence, the truth. I am not, my dear sir, an ass. (What I say, remember, goes no farther.) I am, sir, a theoretical ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... students, and had arrived in the town only a few days before. He, too, had been recommended to Yulia Mihailovna, and she had received him with reverence. I know now that he had only spent one evening in her company before the reading; he had not spoken all that evening, had listened with an equivocal smile to the jests and the general tone of the company surrounding Yulia Mihailovna, and had made an unpleasant impression on every one by his air of haughtiness, and at the same time almost timorous readiness to take offence. It was Yulia Mihailovna herself who had ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... for it, that nothing Mr. John Effingham can do will be thought mal a propos by Mrs. Jared Jarvis. His position in society is too well established, and hers is too equivocal, to leave ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... all that passed with an almost breathless anxiety, a little ceremonial that now took place caused her much pain. Hitherto the manner of Captain Ducie, as respected his companion, had struck her as equivocal. At times it was haughty and distant, while at others it had appeared more conciliatory and kind. All these little changes she had noted with a jealous interest, and the slightest appearance of respect or of disrespect was remarked, as if it could ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... him "le savant le plus universel de l'Europe," but characterized his metaphysical labors with the somewhat equivocal compliment of "metaphysicien assez dli pour vouloir rconcilier la thologie ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... I dare say She'd make more work than the devil in the play. Heard you not never how an actor's wife, Whom he (fond fool) lov'd dearly as his life, Coming in's way did chance to get a jape,[421] As he was 'tired in his devil's shape; And how equivocal a generation Was then begot, and brought forth thereupon? Let it not fright you; this I dare to say, Here is no lecherous devil in our play. He will not rumple Peg, nor Joan, nor Nan, But has enough at home to do with Marian, Whom he so little pleases, she in scorn Does teach ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... plan for a debauch; in love he was most susceptible, and jealous to the point of madness even about a courtesan, had she once taken his fancy; his prodigality was princely, although he had no income; further, he was most sensitive to slights, as all men are who, because they are placed in an equivocal position, fancy that everyone who makes any reference to their origin is ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - THE MARQUISE DE BRINVILLIERS • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... all the time. She was privately married. For certain family reasons the Count had conditioned that their union should for a while be kept secret. Seeing that her equivocal position and her mother's displeasure preyed upon her health and spirits, he declared his marriage. She left the stage to become a reigning beauty in the best society of Austria, lady of half a dozen castles, and sovereign mistress of as many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... out the views just laid down, and admitting you to be a nominative, or quasi-nominative case, we may extend the reasoning to the word me, and call it also a secondary or equivocal nominative; inasmuch as such phrases as it is me it is I ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... is supposed that he will very shortly have one of the great Embassies. Then what will become of the Duchess? To leave Paris and follow him would be a serious thing for a leader of society. And then abroad the world might refuse to accept their equivocal relations, which here are looked upon almost as marriage, in consideration of the propriety of their conduct and their respect for appearances, and considering also the sad state of the Duke, half paralysed and twenty-years older than his wife, who ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... to present my billet on a respectable looking house, the door was opened by the lady of it, wearing a most gingerly aspect. She told me, with an equivocal sort of look, that she had two spare beds in the house, and that either of them were at my service; and, by way of illustration, shewed me into a sort of servant's room, off the kitchen, half full of apples, onions, potatoes, and various kinds of lumber, with a dirty looking bed in one corner; ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... At least such were the ancient names, which I give for the benefit of antiquarian readers. Since the then Princess Victoria visited B——, the loyalty of the Glyndewi people had changed "Herring" into "Victoria;" and her royal consort has since had the equivocal compliment paid him of transmuting "Goose Street" into "Albert Buildings." I trust it will not be considered disloyal to say, that the original sponsors—the geese and the herrings—seen to me to have been somewhat hardly used; having done more for their namesakes, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... at Dervock, 1853, as being inadequate, defective, and unfaithful—part of the document couched in abstract, evasive, and equivocal language. Also, we condemn and reject the Pittsburgh Bond, as ambiguous, self-contradictory and treacherous—"a snare on Mizpah." We abjure and testify against Popery, as delineated by our ancestors in the National Covenant, together with the fictitious dogma of the Immaculate ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... the infusion will be destroyed by its pernicious qualities. Nothing is more prejudicial to the health, or the intellectual faculties of mankind, than adulterated liquors. Articles which in their purest state are of an equivocal character, and never to be trusted without caution, are thus converted into decided poisons.—Another way of making wormwood ale. Take a quantity of the herb, according to the intended strength of the liquor, and infuse it for half an hour in the boiling wort. Then strain ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... yet doubtless full of meaning; for the singer takes to the very tip of a tree, and throws his head back in the most approved style. He does his best, at any rate, and so far ranks with the angels; while, if my testimony can be of any service to him, I am glad to say ('t is too bad the praise is so equivocal) that I have heard many human singers who gave me less pleasure; and further, that he took an indispensable though subordinate part in what was one of the most memorable concerts at which I was ever happy enough to be a listener. This was ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... An equivocal smile touched the pale lips of Chaleck. It might be the weird inhabitant of the little house in Cite Frochot was not so sure as the porter was of the astuteness of the police. Perhaps he was thinking that a few hours before a certain Doctor Chaleck, ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... am wholly opposed to that prurient intermeddling policy which finds so much favour with certain classes of Indian officials. It is constantly thrusting us into equivocal situations, in which our acts and our professions of respect for the independence of other nations are in contradiction, and in which our proceedings become tainted with the double reproach of inconsistency and selfishness. Nothing, ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... of a very old friend?" said he, with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me, I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... most equivocal and repulsive sides. It has deservedly fared ill in the esteem of the saner and more rational of those who have judged him, and there is none in the history of famous men and our spiritual fathers ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... defence of lies. Nor does there seem to me other difference when I consider their respective grounds, except that the ancients frankly called those modes of speech lies, and the more recent writers, not a few of them, call them amphibological, equivocal, and material." ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... plum- cake, so called from the number of large raisins that were showing their black heads in a substance of suspiciously similar color. At each corner of the table stood saucers, filled with a thick fluid of some what equivocal color and consistence, variegated with small dark lumps of a substance that resembled nothing but itself, which Remarkable termed her sweetmeats. At the side of each plate, which was placed bottom upward, with its knife and fork most accurately crossed above it, stood another, of ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... the mendicant deserved a coin, who, knowing the love of wit in Louis XIV., complained sadly to him, Ton image est partout—excepte dans ma poche. In such cases the pun is sometimes transformed, for it only invariably exists where the words are equivocal and where the allusion is peculiarly applicable to the double meaning the falsity vanishes, and the verbal coincidence becomes an effective ornament of style. It has been so used by the most successful writers, ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... as it were, underlined the uttered words, that I was at a loss whether to return the smile in kind or acknowledge the words with a grave little bow. Of course I did neither and there fell on us an odd, equivocal silence. It marked our final abandonment of the French language. I was the one to speak first, proposing that my companions should sup with me, not across the way, which would be riotous with more than one "infernal" supper, but in another much more select establishment in ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... no evil—is not suspicious—does not lay up slight expressions or equivocal conduct, and reason out evil from them, and suffer it to corrode and sour the mind against an individual; but puts the best construction upon the words and conduct of others that they will bear, not yielding ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... native products of Hungarian cookery to the masterly creations of French gastronomic art, and of wines every sort imaginable. The dinner lasted far into the night, and towards the end of it the company began to grow uproarious. The great patriot, as usual, related his lubricous, equivocal anecdotes without troubling himself very much as to whether ladies were present or not. He was wont to say Castis sunt omnia casta, "To the pure all things are pure," and whoever blushed had, no doubt, a good reason for blushing, ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai
... etc., to the talk of S.T.C. (at whose Gamaliel feet he sits weekly) [more] than to that of all the men living. This from him—The great dandled and petted Sectarian—to a religious character so equivocal in the world's Eye as that of S.T.C., so foreign to the Kirk's estimate!—Can this man be a Quack? The language is as affecting as the Spirit of the Dedication. Some friend told him, "This dedication will do you no Good," i.e. not in the world's repute, or with your own ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... sure of it," she continued, "although your behaviour is somewhat equivocal, but you may have reasons which I do not know; and you must now confide them to me. You have protected my daughter from slander, you have fought a duel on her behalf—consequently you have risked your life... Do not answer. I know that you will not acknowledge it because ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... achieve independence—his treaty with the Indians, his sensational plan to incorporate the Cherokees into the new state, his constancy to an ideal of revolt against others in face of the reality of revolt against himself, his struggle, equivocal and half-hearted, with the North Carolina authorities under Tipton—despite all these heroic efforts, the star of Franklin swiftly declined. The vigorous measures pursued by General Joseph Martin, ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... drought, arms all nature against man, sets man against man, and finishes by causing him to expire in pain. Is this what you call preserving a universe? If we attempted to consider without prejudice the equivocal conduct of Providence relative to mankind and to all sentient beings, we should find that very far from resembling a tender and careful mother, it rather resembles those unnatural mothers who, forgetting the unfortunate fruits of their illicit amours, abandon their children ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... suave and tender, with its gentle haze and autumn premonitions. Mr. Leicester said a few equivocal words, while Mrs. Edwards gazed helplessly into the grave. The others fell back behind the minister. Between her and her uncle down there something remained unexplained, and her ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... which a world that goes by evolution can very well dispense. Men easily come to consider clearness and positiveness in their opinions, staunchness in holding and defending them, and fervour in carrying them into action, as equivocal virtues of very doubtful perfection, in a state of things where every abuse has after all had a defensible origin; where every error has, we must confess, once been true relatively to other parts of belief in ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... knew that some men can satisfy their consciences by calling a certain sort of treachery by the soft name of gallantry. He was aware that he could, like many others in similar circumstances, deceive by equivocal looks and expressions, and then throw the blame from themselves, by asking why the woman was such a fool as to believe, protesting that they never had a thought of her, and swearing that they had not the least idea she had ever understood ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... in case of forfeiture stimulated their natural and irregular vivacity to enforce laws which had become obsolete, and they pounced upon American property as they would have gone to war in quest of prize-money. Even at first their acts were equivocal, and they soon came to be as illegal as they were oppressive. There was no redress. An appeal to the Privy Council was costly and difficult; and besides, when it so happened, before the end of the year, that an officer had to defend himself on an appeal, the suffering colonists were exhausted ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... repeated messages to beg that she would see him, if it was only for a moment, but the answers made up by Mrs. Harris were invariably in the negative. The chaplain afterward laughed heartily at the equivocal position he had ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... either invented or allegorized from the names of Egyptian places. Diodorus assures us that by the vast catacombs of Egypt, the dismal mansions of the dead—were the temple and stream, both called Cocytus, the foul canal of Acheron, and the Elysian plains; and according to the same equivocal authority, the body of the dead was wafted across the waters by a pilot, termed Charon in the Egyptian tongue. But previous to the embarkation, appointed judges on the MARGIN of the ACHERON listened ...
— The Author's Printing and Publishing Assistant • Frederick Saunders
... for any individual exponent of the equivocal art: mark the guilty conscience, mark the rising blush, mark the confusion of mind! I mean the old sign one knew you best by; your permanent stall at the Francais, your inveterate attendance at premieres, the way you 'follow' the young ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... example, Lady Emily remained as insupportably natural and sincere as she was beautiful and piquante. At six years old she had declared her intention of marrying her cousin Edward Douglas, and at eighteen her words were little less equivocal. Lord Courtland, who never disturbed himself about anything, was rather diverted with this juvenile attachment; and Lady Juliana, who cared little for her son, and still less for her niece, only wondered how people could be such fools as to think of marrying for love, after she had told them how ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... male creature, whose part it now was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of that word—I had ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... side, Shakspeare was an authentic gentleman. By his father's he would have stood in a more dubious position; but the effect of municipal honors to raise and illustrate an equivocal rank, has always been acknowledged under the popular tendencies of our English political system. From the sort of lead, therefore, which John Shakspeare took at one time amongst his fellow-townsmen, and from his rank of first magistrate, we may presume that, about the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... discussions ended. It had come up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was bad—too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility, almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn't much affected by the consciousness ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... of delirious enchantment, to all her elevated and eloquent admirer uttered; and in return for his praises of her charms, and his equivocal replies in respect to his designs towards her, she gave to him her most undisguised thoughts, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... meal, gritting his teeth, and crushing down the rage that bade fair to suffocate him. He disdained to challenge Jack's equivocal tale. The laughter of one's friends is hard enough to bear sometimes, still, it may be borne with a grin; but when it rings with scarcely concealed hate it stings ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... passage to India by the Cape of Good Hope the identity of this island as described or alluded to by writers is often equivocal, or to be inferred only ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... an hour, he started again the same farce and repeated it often during the evening; he mimicked as if he were calling a person on the second floor and giving her equivocal advices drawn from his imagination of a commercial traveler. At times he assumed a dismal air and sighed:—"Poor girl!"—or he muttered in his teeth, with a peevish air:—"Rascal of a Prussian!"—Several times, when the others did not think of it, he called out repeatedly in a vibrating voice: ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... incapable of diverting any but babies, or men who, by a kind of intellectual privation, contrive to perpetuate babyhood, in the vain hope of preferring innocence: nor could I shelter myself by saying how little I understood of the dialect it was written in, as the action was nothing less than equivocal; and in the burletta which was tacked to it by way of farce, I saw the soprano fingers who played the women's parts, and who see more of the world than these friars, blush for shame, two or three times, while the company, most of them grave ecclesiastics, ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... true,' demanded in infantile tones an equivocal-looking woman whose pale-rose tunic, painted cheeks, and locks shining with essences betrayed wretched pretensions to a youth long passed away—' is it true that Nyssia has two pupils in each eye? It ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... the upright man; and this exclamation, however equivocal it may sound, was intended, on his part, to ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Sagas is not dulness or want of sensibility; it is a consistent mode of procedure, to allow things to make their own impression; and the result is attained by following the order of impressions in the mind of one of the actors, or of a looker-on. "To see things as they are" is an equivocal formula, which may be claimed as their own privilege by many schools and many different degrees of intelligence. "To see things as they become," the rule of Lessing's Laocoon, has not found so many adherents, but ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... but struck off the rolls, and now a chevalier d'industrie, and agent of equivocal affairs, served as a spy for the Baron de Grauen (Rudolph's friend), and gave the diplomatist a great deal of information concerning several characters ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... summer; but, above all, the very name of Palm Sunday (a festival in the English church) troubled me like an anthem. "Sunday!" what was that? That was the day of peace which masked another peace deeper than the heart of man can comprehend. "Palms!" what were they? That was an equivocal word; palms, in the sense of trophies, expressed the pomps of life; palms, as a product of nature, expressed the pomps of summer. Yet still even this explanation does not suffice; it was not merely by the peace ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... another voyage, then ships will cease to trade; or, if he undertakes to blockade her, and thus collect it, she has not gained her independence by secession. What must she do? If she is contented to live in this equivocal state, all would be well perhaps; but she could not live there. No people in the world could live in that condition. What will they do? They must take the initiative and declare war upon the United States; and the moment that ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... and I repeat, that a man has no reason to be ashamed of having an ape for his grandfather. If there were an ancestor whom I should feel shame in recalling, it would be a man, a man of restless and versatile intellect, who, not content with an equivocal success in his own sphere of activity, plunges into scientific questions with which he has no real acquaintance, only to obscure them by an aimless rhetoric, and distract the attention of his hearers from ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... year 1708, the term Fellows of the House was applied, at Harvard College, both to the members of the Corporation, and to the instructors who did not belong to the Corporation. The equivocal meaning of this title was noticed by President Leverett, for, in his duplicate record of the proceedings of the Corporation and the Overseers, he designated certain persons to whom he refers as "Fellows of the House, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... lines to record their visit. They pray the Blessed Virgin that she will maintain them safe and sound from everything equivocal that may befall them (sempre sani e salvi da ogni equivoco li possa accadere). Oh, farewell! We reverently salute all the present statues, and especially the Blessed ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... was Mr. Peter Van Tromp, an English-speaking, two-legged animal of the international genus, and by profession of general and more than equivocal utility. Years before he had been a painter of some standing in a colony, and portraits signed 'Van Tromp' had celebrated the greatness of colonial governors and judges. In those days he had been married, and driven his wife and infant daughter in a pony trap. What were the steps of his declension? ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... its treaties with other nations can not be executed without the establishment and enforcement of new principles of maritime police, to be applied without our consent, we must employ a language neither of equivocal import or susceptible of misconstruction. American citizens prosecuting a lawful commerce in the African seas under the flag of their country are not responsible for the abuse or unlawful use of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John Tyler • John Tyler
... by going on, or by turning back, or by standing still, would have signified nothing towards proving that she had intended to put an end to her own life and to that of her child. One shudders to think that innocent women may have suffered an ignominous death, from such equivocal proofs and inconclusive reasoning. ...
— On the uncertainty of the signs of murder in the case of bastard children • William Hunter
... more unjust to him, to pause without dissipating the cloud we have unexpectedly cast over him. The temptation to scrutinize his conduct and bearing is irresistible. Is it not better to lay bare all the facts, than to leave matters in the equivocal condition they ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... preeminently the land of material progress. Here the prize was within every man's reach; patient industry need never doubt its reward; nay, in defiance of the four gospels, assiduity in pursuit of gain was promoted to the rank of a duty, and thrift and godliness were linked in equivocal wedlock. Politically she was free; socially she suffered from that subtile and searching oppression which the dominant opinion of a free community may exercise over the members who compose it. As a whole, she grew upon ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... state of mind and inexperience he failed to notice the equivocal nature of this denial. He heard the impassioned negatives; he saw fear, resentment, and a sort of womanly repulsion in the frightened gesture she flung upon the air, and what he wished to hear and prayed to hear, that he heard. Crabbe then had ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... New-York, the commissioners for detecting and defeating conspiracies, &c., were directed to tender an oath of allegiance, in the said act prescribed, to certain persons, inhabitants of this state, who have affected to observe, during the present war, a dangerous and equivocal neutrality; and on their refusal to take the same, that the said commissioners should cause them to be conveyed within the enemy's lines. In consequence whereof, sundry persons, to whom the said oath hath been tendered, and who have refused to take the same, were by the commissioners directed to ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... by the intensity of her need, she had made small account of convenances. But she acknowledged that a half truth had nearly compassed destruction of her hopes and the ruin of a man; a liar had taken advantage of an equivocal position. But now the whole truth about her was clear. Her identity was known—her motives were beyond all question. And there were no vindictive liars among those loyal followers who had come storming down the river for the sake ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... never had been any appearance of God, this eternal deprivation would have been equivocal, and might have as well corresponded with the absence of all divinity, as with the unworthiness of men to know Him; but His occasional, though not continual, appearances remove the ambiguity, If He appeared once, He exists always; and thus we cannot but conclude both that ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... and entire destruction of the works. He did not see the advantage of doing the thing by halves; while the destruction of the sea defences only might give rise to erroneous impressions and would be of an equivocal character. The fall of Sebastopol would in fact be the conquest of the Crimea, and the Allies might winter there with perfect security, as, by occupying the lines of Perekop,[53] any access to the Crimea would effectually be prevented by land. Lord Aberdeen ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... these two lines to record their visit. They pray the Blessed Virgin that she will maintain them safe and sound from everything equivocal that may befall them (sempre sani e salvi da ogni equivoco li possa accadere). Oh, farewell! We reverently salute all the present statues, and especially the Blessed Virgin, ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... where Jean-Jacques signed the transfer of the income, which henceforth became Philippe's. The exhausted old man and the Rabouilleuse were now plunged by their nephew into the excessive dissipations of the dangerous and restless society of actresses, journalists, artists, and the equivocal women among whom Philippe had already wasted his youth; where old Rouget found excitements that soon after killed him. Instigated by Giroudeau, Lolotte, one of the handsomest of the Opera ballet-girls, was the amiable assassin of the old man. Rouget died after a splendid supper at ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... and her most ambitious novel, "The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless" (1751). The productions known to be hers do not certainly represent the entire output of her industry during this period, for since "The Dunciad" her writing had been almost invariably anonymous. One or two equivocal bits of secret history and scandal-mongering may probably be attributed to her at the very time when in "Epistles for the Ladies" (1749-50) she was advocating sobriety, religion, and morality. These suspected lapses into her old habits ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... for two hundred years. He died, however, at seventy-three. The Duchess de Choiseul was desirous of following the same system, but the duke her husband in much wrath forbade her to follow any system prescribed by a man who had so equivocal a reputation ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... of a nature altogether equivocal and ambiguous, or, rather, it must appear so to those who believe the hypothetical order of their own ideas to be the real order of things, and who see nothing in the infinite chain of existences but a few apparent points to which they will ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... a Croud in damasks, silks, and crapes, Equivocal in dress, half-belles, half-trapes: A length of night-gown rich Phantasia trails, Olinda wears one shift, and pares no nails: Some in C——l's Cabinet each act display, When nature in a transport dies away: Some more refin'd transcribe their Opera-loves On Iv'ry Tablets, or in clean ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... conduct in running Mr. Polk as a tariff man in the North, and an anti-tariff man in the South! Look to the two lives of Cass. Look to their equivocal position as to slavery and the Union. Look to their appeals to foreigners and Catholics by name in the elections of 1844 and 1852, and probably in 1848. Look to their alliance with Free Germans and Fourierites, Free Soilers and Secessionists. And, above all, look to the miserable cant ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... think one's motive is to withdraw her from a relation which ought to be the most natural in the world, but which is, in her particular and painful case, the most equivocal.' ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... There is, as I honestly believe, no prospect whatever of your father being able to get the money to pay off Cossey and Son, and if he did, it would not help him, because he could not pay the interest on it. Under these circumstances you have to choose between putting yourself in an equivocal position and letting events take their course. It would be useless for anybody else to undertake the task, and of course I cannot guarantee that even you will succeed, but I will not mince matters—as you doubtless know, any man would find it hard to refuse a favour asked by such a suppliant. ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... company tone too, the result of the desire to avoid publicity. Adela admired her father; she knew what he was feeling if Mrs. Godfrey had been at him, and yet she saw him positively gallant. He was mildly austere, or rather even—what was it?—august; just as, coldly equivocal, he never looked at his son, so that at moments he struck her as almost sick with sadness. Godfrey was equally inscrutable and therefore wholly different from what he had been as he stood before her in the park. If he was to start on his career ...
— The Marriages • Henry James
... strong armour of bone, and furnished with but one solitary rudder-like fin; other fish with the membranes of their fins thickly covered with scales; creatures bristling over with thorns; others glistening in an enamelled coat, as if beautifully japanned; the tail in every instance among the less equivocal shapes formed not equally, as in existing fish, on each side the central vertebral column, but chiefly on the lower side—the column sending out its diminished vertebrae to the extreme termination ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... expected by her cousin Lescaut, a Garde du Corps, and while he is looking for her luggage, the young beauty is accosted by Guillot-Marfontaine, an old roue, and rich farmer, who annoys her with his equivocal speeches, and offers her a seat in his carriage. He is quickly driven away by Lescaut on his return; the young man is however enticed away by his comrades to play a game of cards, for which purpose he leaves his cousin a second ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... Kunjra men are usually clean-shaven with the exception of the beard, which is allowed to grow long below the chin. Their women are not tattooed. In the cities, Mr. Crooke remarks, [46] their women have an equivocal reputation, as the better-looking girls who sit in the shops are said to use considerable freedom of manners to attract customers. They are also very quarrelsome and abusive when bargaining for the sale of their wares or arguing with each other. This is so much ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... impossible. It would have seemed to her inconsistent with Chatty's dignity and her own. But opposition and a desire to have the better of one's domestic and intimate opponents is very strong, and tempts people to the most equivocal proceedings. Mrs. Warrender did not wait to think, but took out a fresh sheet of paper and dipped her pen in the ink with that impulsiveness which was characteristic of her. A note or two had already passed between Dick Cavendish and herself, so that it was not so extraordinary a proceeding ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... promoted to a cap, which added the grace of a flourish to his bow; Bessy had added the luxury of a pinafore to her nondescript garments; and both pairs of little feet were advanced to the certain dignity, although somewhat equivocal comfort, of ...
— The Ground-Ash • Mary Russell Mitford
... love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. The ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... his entire capital in the construction and equipment of a factory, will be quite likely, when B., C., and D. erect factories in his immediate neighborhood, to hold his peace when sundry varieties of swill milk are offered at his door, instead of speaking out an equivocal protest against the insult thus offered to his professional ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... of applause, and still less equivocal approbation, bursts of laughter, constitute perfect success to a comic writer, Mr Reynolds, in this, as well as in other of his comedies, ...
— The Dramatist; or Stop Him Who Can! - A Comedy, in Five Acts • Frederick Reynolds
... saying to her for the last ten minutes, forgot the depressing certainty that he would have a great deal more that he wanted to say in the immediate future, over and above the thirty-five minutes or so of discourse that she would contract to listen to next Sunday. And Cicely listened with the wistful equivocal triumph of one whose goose has turned out to be a swan and who realises with secret concern that she has only planned the ...
— When William Came • Saki
... the rank and wholesome poor man's nectar, the sun-tanned product of the plebeian buckwheat. Buckwheat honey is the black sheep in this white flock, but there is spirit and character in it. It lays hold of the taste in no equivocal manner, especially when at a winter breakfast it meets its fellow, the russet buckwheat cake. Bread with honey to cover it from the same stalk is double good fortune. It is not black, either, but nut-brown, and belongs to the same ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs
... and does not hesitate to meet her face to face, and to trust and try himself alone with her. The result of all which appears in a greater freshness and reality of delineation. Here the persons have nothing of a dim, equivocal hearsay air about them, such as marks in some measure his earlier efforts in comedy. The characters indeed are not pitched in so high a key, nor conceived in so much breadth and vigour, as in several of the plays written at earlier dates: the plan of the work did not require this, or even admit ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... Mrs. Evelyn's definition of a very old friend?" said he, with another smile, as that lady moved off to take a more particular view of what she had come to see. "To judge by the specimen before me, I should consider it very equivocal." ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... required, and understand that anything you suggest shall be done. In the meantime pray order at once the water-engine and new pedal-board of which you speak, and inform me as to the cost.' He took me quite aback, and was gone before I had time to say anything. It puts me in a very equivocal position; I have such an antipathy to the man. I shall refuse his offer point-blank. I will not put myself under any obligation to such a man. You would refuse in my position? You would write a strong letter of refusal at once, would ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... was not a legal marriage, and English public opinion was severe in its condemnation. In the actual result the sympathetic companionship of Mr. Lewes was of the greatest value to George Eliot and brought her much happiness; yet she evidently felt keenly the equivocal social position, and it was probably in large part the cause of the increasing ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... or, as some say, it is the Saxon do"—Practical Gram., p. 66. Thus, by suggesting two false and inconsistent derivations, though he uses not the name equivocal article, he first makes the word an article, and then equivocal—equivocal in etymology, and of course in meaning.[403] Nixon, in his English Parser, supposes it to be, unequivocally, the Greek article [Greek: to], the. See the work, p. 83. D. Booth says, "To is, by us, applied to Verbs; but it was ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... a "mighty onsartin" one. Here, now, in a magazine sketch, we find it stated that one of the characters of the story was "as rich as CROESUS, and a good fellow to boot." Vernacularly, this is correct; and yet so equivocal is it that it puzzles one to think why the acquisition of wealth should subject the holder of it to the liability ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 29, October 15, 1870 • Various
... with punch and tobacco; Tony at the head of the table, &c., discovered." Never perhaps, in any previous representation, was the mise en scene so perfect. It drew three rounds of applause. A very equivocal compliment to ourselves it may be; but such jolly-looking "shabby fellows" as sat round the table at which our Tony presided, were never furnished by the supernumeraries of Drury or Covent-garden. They were as classical, in their ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... was an authentic gentleman. By his father's he would have stood in a more dubious position; but the effect of municipal honors to raise and illustrate an equivocal rank, has always been acknowledged under the popular tendencies of our English political system. From the sort of lead, therefore, which John Shakspeare took at one time amongst his fellow-townsmen, and from his rank of first ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... the poet Treherne, "you might as well say Squire Vane doesn't exist, and that he's only an allegory for a weathercock." Something a shade too cool about this sally drew the lawyer's red brows together. He looked across the table and met the poet's somewhat equivocal smile. ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... suggested, though not made visible, but to the mind's eye? We remember in our school days giving Virgil credit for much tact in endeavouring to make a gentleman of AEneas, and succeeding too for a while in raising the more than equivocal character of his hero, by placing him in the picture-gallery of the Queen of Carthage, and giving him leisure to contemplate and to criticise, and poetically to describe to his silent and spiritless lounger-friend many ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... Jew, no doubt must hang over the negotiation. The money, with pledges, and thine own conscience for arbiter between us; but no equivocal dealings, to be followed by a disappointment, under the pretence that second ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Page especially he had never manifested anything but cordiality. Yet it was evident, as Page came into his office this morning, that to Lord Robert, as to every member of the Government, the President's note, with its equivocal phrases, had been a terrible shock. His manner was extremely courteous, as always, but he made no attempt to conceal his feelings. Ordinarily Lord Robert did not wear his emotions on the surface; but he took occasion on this visit to tell Page how greatly ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... take this audit, take this life,/And cancel those cold bonds] This equivocal use of bonds is another instance of our author's infelicity in ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... fresh, strawberry and cream complexion under a plenteous harvest of flaxen hair would not be associated in America with anyone very serious. There she would have been thought arrayed by Nature as a tearing blonde, suitable for the equivocal light stage, or as a frivolous artist's model, or as promenade girl in a suit and cloak house. But in Fraeulein the extraordinary combination of volatile comeliness and unimpeachable earnestness daily worked ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... a very effective support, declaring that these laws could not possibly be preserved on their present basis. Mr. Hume, who was a very forward champion of English radicalism and colonial monopoly, at first objected to the new policy, but in equivocal and undecided terms, and finally supported the government. Mr. Gladstone spoke as if for the purpose of showing that he could consistently support either side, as he practically opposed both. Mr. Cobden made a "peace-society" speech, as illogical as it was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... was equivocal; it produced no impression on him. They reached a village where her leader deemed it adviseable to drive for the remainder of the distance up the valley to the barrier snow-mountain. She assented instantly, she had no longer any active wishes of her own, save to make amends to her brother, who ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sovereigns separated. Leopold to go and be crowned at Prague, and the king of Prussia, returning to Berlin, began to put his army on a war footing. The emigrants, triumphing in the engagement they had entered into, increased in numbers. The courts of Europe, with the exception of England, sent in equivocal adhesions to the courts of Berlin and Vienna. The noise of the declaration of Pilnitz burst forth, and died away in Paris in the midst of the fetes in honour of the acceptance ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... replying, peered at the black baffling sky. The air had, almost suddenly, grown warmer. Above, in the regions unseen, mysterious activities were in movement, as if marshalling vast forces. The stars had vanished. A gentle but equivocal wind on the cheek presaged rain, and seemed to be bearing downwards into the homeliness of the earth some strange vibration out of infinite space. The primeval elements of the summer night encouraged and intensified Hilda's mood, half joyous, half apprehensive. She thought: ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... unmistakable Atheist. He did not admit a God in any rational sense. True, he professed to believe in gods, but evidently in a very equivocal manner, and solely to escape the popular condemnation. "They are not pure spirits, for there is no spirit in the atomic theory; they are not bodies, for where are the bodies that we may call gods? In ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... please her greatly. She had been the most anxious of us all to see her father's murderer brought to justice, and now, when through the efforts of M. Godin, a man stood all but convicted of the crime, she was pleased to hear Maitland, whose efforts to track Latour she had applauded in no equivocal way, say that he should spare no pains to give the suspect every possible chance to prove his innocence. There was certainly a reason, whatever it might have been, for Gwen's attitude in this matter, for that young woman was exceptionally rational in all things. ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... life of Law, and the equivocal means by which he appeared to live, playing high, and always with great success, threw a cloud of suspicion over him wherever he went, and caused him to be expelled by the magistracy from the semi-commercial, semi-aristocratical cities ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... remonstrance will avail nothing. I cannot be a hypocrite: I cannot dissemble that I have once been criminal, and that I am, at present, conscious of a thousand weaknesses and self-distrusts. There is but one meagre and equivocal merit that belongs to me. I stick to the truth; yet this is a virtue of late growth. It has not yet acquired firmness to resist the undermining waves of habit, or to be motionless amidst the hurricane ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... don't make me ridiculous any more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses. It did well enough five years ago when I came to see you, and was moral coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines, to feed upon such epithets; but, besides that, the meaning of gentle is equivocal at best, and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished. I hope my virtues have done sucking. I can scarce ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... labor, who was afterwards quite ill and feverish; but at the time I did not consider her case a decided puerperal fever. On the 8th I attended one who did well. On the 12th, one who was seriously sick. This was also an equivocal case, apparently arising from constipation and irritation of the rectum. These women were ten miles apart and five from my residence. On 15th and 2Oth two who did well. On 25th I attended another. This was a severe labor, and followed ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... free navigation of the Mississippi, a river that forms the sole passage from the western States to the ocean. This navigation, although of general benefit, has been always valued and desired, as of peculiar advantage to the Western States, whose demands to obtain it were neither equivocal nor unreasonable. But with the river Mississippi, by a sort of coercion, we acquired, by good or ill fortune, as our future measures shall determine, the whole province of Louisiana. As this acquisition was made at the common expense, it is very fairly urged that the advantages to be derived ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... off,—a melancholy more common amongst very young men in such scenes than we are apt to suppose. Somehow or other, the pleasure was not congenial to him; he had no Mrs. M'Catchley to endear it; he knew very few people, he was shy, he felt his position with his uncle was equivocal, he had not the habit of society, he heard, incidentally, many an ill-natured remark upon his uncle and the entertainment, he felt indignant and mortified. He had been a great deal happier eating his radishes ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Waterloo, from whom better things might have been expected. He has taken for his model, Mr. Lloyd's really excellent Field Sports of the North of Europe; but he has woefully missed his mark. The title of the work before us is equivocal: a reader might as reasonably expect the Sports of the Western World, as adventures in Ireland, such as make up the present volumes. What we principally complain of is the paucity of Sports among their contents. It ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 574 - Vol. XX, No. 574. Saturday, November 3, 1832 • Various
... the comforts of the trig, close house that Mrs. Royston had built for her, and the abundance of warm furnishings and nutritious food, a degree of luxury indeed which was hardly known elsewhere in the Boundary. Her prosperity had evolved the equivocal advantage of restoring her prestige as a sibyl, and she had entered upon a new lease of the practice of the dark arts of fortune-telling and working charms and spells. He gave a humorous account of her expressions of gratitude to him for the restoration of her sight, which facetiousness ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... Rosenberg was dead, and asked me if the Comte de Waldstein had in the library the illustration of the Villa d'Altichiero, which the Emperor had asked for in vain at the city library of Prague, and when I answered 'yes,' he gave an equivocal laugh. A moment afterwards, he asked me if he might tell the Emperor. 'Why not, monseigneur? It is not a secret.' 'Is His Majesty coming to Dux?' 'If he goes to Oberlaitensdorf (sic) he will go to Dux, too; and he may ask you for it, for there is ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... that the Mexican public will thus see the uniformity and decision of the whole republic in favour of order, and especially will receive in the communication of his Excellency, General Santa Anna, an equivocal proof of this unity of sentiment, notwithstanding the assurances given by the rebels to the people, that Santa Anna would either assist them, or would take no part at all in the affair. It must be confessed, however, that his Excellency is ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... deny that there are a few things which are better managed in England than in the United States, I submit that the method of bringing teacher and employer into communication by means of a professional agent is one of these things. At all events, there is nothing equivocal about the English method. Let the reader judge for himself from the following details: (1) The registration-fee is one shilling, not eight (two dollars). (2) The commission—generally five per cent.—is payable, not as soon as an engagement is made, but at the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... like equivocal sayings, were followed by a vague buzz, which was traceable to no individual author, but seemed to rise on all sides, like a dark mist, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Then I adjusted it to the matter in hand which was neither more nor less than an elopement. Yes, by Jove! It was something very much like an elopement—with certain unusual characteristics of its own which made it in a sense equivocal. With amused wonder I remembered that my sagacity was requisitioned in such a connection. How unexpected! But we never know what tests our gifts may be put to. Sagacity dictated caution first of all. I believe caution to be the first duty of sagacity. Fyne sat down as if preparing ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... unnatural,' said she, 'for a woman to quarrel with curiosity; so far from complaining of yours, I am come merely with a design to gratify it, and only expect you will judge of my desire to oblige you by my readiness in obeying your commands; were I myself the subject, the motive for my obedience might be equivocal.' ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... quaint arrangements of the rambling building, and their yet quainter fittings. Here, a cabinet, painted and carved in a sentimental but vicious style; there, an equivocal-looking chapel, studded with enamels and mother-of-pearl, with miniatures on ivory wrought out in relief, like those on old-fashioned snuff-boxes; there, one of those pretty Florentine retreats, adapted to the hypochondriasis of women, and even then called boudoirs. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... youth had died away. The excitable, thoughtless, pleasure-seeking officer of the king had become a grave, industrious, indefatigable, moral, austere servant of the people and of liberty. The songs of joy, of equivocal jesting, of political satire, had died away on those lips which only opened now in the clubs, in the National Assembly, to utter inspired words in regard to ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... bidden began to present itself to his mind with peculiar force. What was the good of going to the station for a man who was not coming by the train? What was the use of pretending to bring home a person who had never been away? These and other equivocal problems defied solution when Natt ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... me, but a wall, Impenetrable, insurmountable, Rises obedient to the spells I muttered And meant not—my own doings tower behind me. 25 A punishable man I seem, the guilt, Try what I will, I cannot roll off from me; The equivocal demeanour of my life Bears witness on my prosecutor's party; And even my purest acts from purest motives 30 Suspicion poisons with malicious gloss. Were I that thing, for which I pass, that traitor, A goodly outside I had sure reserved, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... by the want of unity in the Cabinet—especially between Mr. Townshend and Lord Shelburne on the Irish questions—is minute and voluminous; and only a few letters have been selected from the mass to show the course of ministerial diplomacy in reference to the equivocal relations subsisting at that period between the two countries. They form a running commentary upon a curious passage in Irish history; and although the circumstances to which they relate have long ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... least part of a word," is to utter what is neither good English nor true doctrine. The two articles a and the are here inconsistent with each other. "A letter" is one letter, any letter; but "the first principle of a word" is, surely, not one or any principle taken indefinitely. Equivocal as the phrase is, it must mean either some particular principle, or some particular first principle, of a word; and, taken either way, the assertion is false. For it is manifest, that in no sense can we affirm of each of the letters of a word, that it is ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... his eyes. It was rather an equivocal compliment, considering the person to whom she spoke. But he was not one of the kind to take offence, as Janet ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal terms to Madame de Fischtaminel: your fair friend comes to visit her, and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you and says ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... for a moment, and as he watched her his surprise grew. Equivocal though her position was, he knew very well that this was no ordinary thief whom he had surprised in his rooms, engaged to all appearance in rifling his desk. The fact that she was a beautiful woman was one which he scarcely took into account. ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the house, but even in that short time he saw enough to convince him that she possessed the most unusual attractions. His curiosity was not only highly excited by this incident, but his spirits were improved to a still more notable degree. The alarming manners and more than equivocal life of his father ceased from that moment to prey upon his mind; from that moment he embraced his new family with ardour; and whether the young lady should prove his sister or his wife, he felt convinced she was an angel in disguise. So much was this the case that he was seized ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Fermor would feel such raillery to be equivocal. It may be added, that an equal want of delicacy is implied in the mock-heroic battle at the end, where the ladies are gifted with ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture. The word "religion," as ordinarily used, is equivocal. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, religious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to "organize" themselves, they become ecclesiastical institutions with corporate ambitions of their own. The spirit of politics ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... of the French translator is here rather equivocal, but distinctly bears the construction here given of the marquis being at supper in the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... able to disturb you; but fear not," he continued, as she was about to speak, "I also am here to protect you," and he accompanied the words, with a glance that left the nature of the protection offered more than equivocal. ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... but too good a prophet when I warned you to expect new extravagances from the Due de Chaulnes's son. Some weeks ago he lost five hundred pounds to one Virette, an equivocal being, that you remember here. Paolucci, the Modenese minister, who is not in the odour of honesty, was of the party. The Duc de Pecquigny said to the latter, "Monsieur, ne jouez plus avec lui, si vous n''etes pas de moiti'e." So far was very well. On Saturday ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... mere waste to the enemy, but their forts and small towns were set on fire; he refrained from attacking the cities into which fear had driven the Etrurians. The consul Cneius Fulvius fought a glorious battle in Samnium, near Bovianum, attended with success by no means equivocal. Then, having attacked Bovianum, and not long after Aufidena, ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... chilly-looking old women in tumbled caps, and young ones in loose jackets and carelessly fastened skirts, with bare heads and tired, faded faces, eloquent of the wretchedness of their lives. There are some men also: tidy old buffers, porters in greasy jackets, and equivocal-looking individuals in black silk hats, while the foot-path is overrun by a swarm of youngsters dragging toy carts without wheels about, filling pails with sand, and screaming and fighting; a dreadful crew, with ragged ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Bernadotte arrived in Paris. His situation had become equivocal, since circumstances had banished the hopes he might have conceived in his interview with the Emperor Alexander at Abo. Besides, he had been represented in some official pamphlets as a traitor to France, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... Renovation at Dervock, 1853, as being inadequate, defective, and unfaithful—part of the document couched in abstract, evasive, and equivocal language. Also, we condemn and reject the Pittsburgh Bond, as ambiguous, self-contradictory and treacherous—"a snare on Mizpah." We abjure and testify against Popery, as delineated by our ancestors in the National Covenant, together with the fictitious ...
— The Auchensaugh Renovation of the National Covenant and • The Reformed Presbytery
... Jack MacRae that his father, pouring out the tale of those troubled years, had bestowed upon him an equivocal heritage. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... re-improving, doing and undoing here. It is a perfect Penelope's web. Carpenters and bricklayers have been at work for these eighteen months, and yet I sometimes stand and wonder whether anything has really been done. One exploit in last June was, however, by no means equivocal. Our good neighbour fancied that the limes shaded the rooms, and made them dark (there was not a creature in the house but the workmen), so he had all the leaves stripped from every tree. There they stood, poor miserable skeletons, as bare as Christmas under the ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... am aware of that. He will bring his instructions. I am old enough in state affairs to understand how people can be supplanted, without being actually deprived of office. First, he will produce a commission, couched in terms somewhat obscure and equivocal; he will stretch his authority, for the power is in his hands; if I complain, he will hint at secret instructions; if I desire to see them, he will answer evasively; if I insist, he will produce a paper of totally different import; and if this fail to satisfy ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... invitations to re-enter his ships. He asked them whether they were still willing to go on with him to Hochelaga, of which they had told him, and which it was his purpose to visit. The two Indians assented, but their manner was equivocal ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... small or so unimportant but that a portion of spirit dwells in it; and this spiritual substance requires a proper subject to become a plant or an animal"; and Hallam in a note on this passage observes how the modern theories of equivocal generation correspond ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... see your call to the loyal women. Will you let me know distinctly if you propose to commit yourselves to the idea of loyalty to the present Government? I can not believe you do. But to me there is something equivocal in the call, if it does not mean that. I am sorry it is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... or tubercles, Sea-hedgehog, madrepore, sea-ruff, or pad, Fungus, or sponge, or that gelatinous fish, That taken from its element at once Stinks, melts, and dies a fluid; so from these, Through many a tribe of less equivocal life, Dividual or insect, up I ranged, From sentient to percipient, small advance, Next to intelligent, to rational next, So to half spiritual human kind, And what is more, is more than man may know. Last came the troublesome ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... the night before Wyvis' return. The whole household seemed somewhat disorganized by the prospect. There was an air of subdued excitement visible in the oldest and staidest of the servants, for in spite of Wyvis' many shortcomings and his equivocal position, he was universally liked by his inferiors, if not by those who esteemed themselves his superiors, in social station. Mrs. Brand had gone to bed early, and Janetta hoped that she was asleep; ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... particular hurry to wend his way home to his dearly beloved Queenstown and it was highly likely some sponger's bawdyhouse of retired beauties where age was no bar off Sheriff street lower would be the best clue to that equivocal character's whereabouts for a few days to come, alternately racking their feelings (the mermaids') with sixchamber revolver anecdotes verging on the tropical calculated to freeze the marrow of anybody's bones ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... according to this system, we actually behold, is as thorough idealism as Berkeley's, inasmuch as it equally, perhaps in a more perfect degree, removes all reality and immediateness of perception, and places us in a dream-world of phantoms and spectres, the inexplicable swarm and equivocal generation of motions in our own brains.—3. That this hypothesis neither involves the explanation, nor precludes the necessity, of a mechanism and co-adequate forces in the percipient, which at the more than ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... subjects very remote from the private interests and circumstances of the writer himself. At least I have found, that where the subject is taken immediately from the author's personal sensations and experiences the excellence of a particular poem is but an equivocal mark, and often a fallacious ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... forth into a roll of that sudden, graceful, but somewhat equivocal laughter that was habitual with her. Then ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... in a low tone, after the manner of Kean's offended fathers. "What! you, Mr. Sawley—the stoker's friend—the enemy of gambling—the father of Selina—condescend to so equivocal a transaction? You amaze me! But I never was the man to press heavily on a friend"—here Sawley brightened up. "Your secret is safe with me, and it shall be your own fault if it reaches the ears of the Session. Pay me over the difference at the present market price, and I release ...
— Stories by English Authors: Scotland • Various
... which he was a member, he used to appear in a black coat and knee-breeches, with a ruffled shirt, white waistcoat, and white silk stockings. He was the Chairman of the Whig Senatorial caucus, and on the last night of the extra session Mr. Clay had complimented him, in rather equivocal language, on the ability with which he had presided. When the laughter had subsided, Senator Dixon rose, and with inimitable humor thanked the Senator from Kentucky. "I am aware," said he, "that I never had but one equal as a presiding ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... for the want of fame, of empire, and of success; and whilst they refused to acknowledge his stupendous triumph over the powers of darkness and of the grave, they misrepresented, or they insulted, the equivocal birth, wandering life, and ignominious death, of the divine ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... and frivolous duchesses of the day, a lady whose adventures caused an explosion five years later. Just then, however, she was in the full blaze of her glory; she had been suspected, it is true, of equivocal conduct; but suspicion, while it is still suspicion and not proof, marks a woman out with the kind of distinction which slander gives to a man. Nonentities are never slandered; they chafe because they are left in peace. This woman was, in fact, the Duchesse de Maufrigneuse, a daughter ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... during most of its stages, but that on the contrary a state exists precisely opposed to it. The indications of distention of the liver, clearly perceived in some cases, have been pain, tenderness, and sense of distention, in the right hypochondrium, and, what is less equivocal than these, very considerable swelling and prominence of the liver. The inflammation of its tunic is an effect of this distention and of the consequent pressure against the ...
— Cases of Organic Diseases of the Heart • John Collins Warren
... called real, the terms really, substantially, and essentially, are used in the Protestant Confessions, and by their Doctors." It is plain from what he subjoins, that he sought rather to unite different sentiments by means of equivocal expressions, than by an exact Creed, which might be susceptible of only one sense. "We must not condemn, says he, those who assure us that the Eucharist is but the sign of the body of Jesus Christ, since St. Augustine, with ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... with rather an equivocal grace, proceeded to the parlor, while Sam, rolling his eyes after him with unutterable meaning, proceeded gravely with ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... return to office, Delestang, her husband, was, at her request, appointed Minister of Commerce and Agriculture. She had not, however, forgiven Rougon, and privately took a leading part in the agitation against his administration. Having become on somewhat equivocal terms with the Emperor, she was able to secure the acceptance of Rougon's second resignation, and the office of Minister of the Interior for her husband. ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson
... 'equivocal', 'equivocate', 'equivocation'. These words, which belonged at first to logic, have slipped down into common use, and in so doing have lost all the precision of their first employment. 'Equivocation' is now almost any such dealing in ambiguous words with the intention ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... in the Japonian language, signified something too dishonest to be spoken. The Father declared, that the word in Latin had only a pure and pious meaning. Nevertheless, that it might not give scandal, nor pollute the imagination of the Japonians by an equivocal sound, he ordered the new Christians, from thenceforward, to use the word beate instead of it; and to say, Beate Petre, Beate Pauls, in the room of Sancte Petre, Sancte Paule. Concerning the name of God, the Bonzas would also have fastened a quarrel on the Father; because ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... cheeks added an apparent five years to her age. If she had been put upon her trial for murder, the police reporters would have discovered traces of great beauty in her countenance. An ordinary spectator, having no occasion to spice a paragraph, would have made the equivocal remark that she had ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... gentil-homme," in a tone contrasting so strongly with the smile, which, as it were, underlined the uttered words, that I was at a loss whether to return the smile in kind or acknowledge the words with a grave little bow. Of course I did neither and there fell on us an odd, equivocal silence. It marked our final abandonment of the French language. I was the one to speak first, proposing that my companions should sup with me, not across the way, which would be riotous with more than one "infernal" supper, but in another much more select establishment in a side ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... merry voices beneath her window. The Chevalier was making equivocal jokes, foreign witticisms, vulgar and clumsy. She listened, in despair. Servigny, just a bit tipsy, was imitating the common workingman, calling the Marquise "the Missus." And all of a sudden he said to Saval: "Well, Boss?" That ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... step in the same free way had not in the least involved the relegation of his daughter. That it was remarkable they should have been able at once so to separate and so to keep together had never for a moment, from however far back, been equivocal to her; that it was remarkable had in fact quite counted, at first and always, and for each of them equally, as part of their inspiration and their support. There were plenty of singular things they were NOT enamoured of—flights ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... was universal in Europe from the middle of the 12th to the end of the 13th century, after which time the Asiatic story seems gradually to have died away, whilst the Royal Presbyter was assigned to a locus in Abyssinia; the equivocal application of the term India to the East of Asia and the East of Africa facilitating this transfer. Indeed I have a suspicion, contrary to the view now generally taken, that the term may from the first have belonged to the Abyssinian Prince, though circumstances ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... never fully cured himself of that passion, which now broke out afresh, like a fire which has only slumbered for a time. He spent night after night at his club, playing at baccarat, and could be met in the betting ring at every race meeting. Then, too, he glided into equivocal society and appeared at home only at intervals to vent his irritation and spite and jealousy upon his ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... amazed beyond measure. I stood repeating his phrase about 'the full price' a hundred times over, but still found it and his passion inexplicable. To cut the matter short, I could come to no other conclusion than that he desired to insult me, and aware of my poverty and the equivocal position in which I stood towards mademoiselle, chose his words accordingly. This seemed a thing unworthy of one of whom I had before thought highly; but calmer reflection enabling me to see something of youthful bombast in the tirade he had delivered, I smiled a little ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... portrayal of the American workingman is a 'moving picture' in two senses of this equivocal phrase. It is kinetoscopic, first of all, in its lifelikeness and the convincing reality of the actions it pictures. Then, again, it is emotionally moving; for the character of Anton, the big, honest, alert and energetic Chicago laborer, can hardly fail to arouse in the reader intense admiration, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... swift and somewhat equivocal courtship he had had nothing to say in his letters; in fact recently he had nothing to say about Sylvia at all, reserving that vital confidence for the clear sympathy and understanding which he looked ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... king was received most hospitably by the grand monarque, Louis XIV., who gave him palaces, money, and all that he required, and, moreover, gave him a fine army and fleet to go to Ireland and recover his kingdom, bidding him farewell with this equivocal sentence, "That the best thing he, Louis, could wish to him was, never to see his face again." They may further recollect, that King James and King William met at the battle of the Boyne, in which the former was defeated, ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... independence—his treaty with the Indians, his sensational plan to incorporate the Cherokees into the new state, his constancy to an ideal of revolt against others in face of the reality of revolt against himself, his struggle, equivocal and half-hearted, with the North Carolina authorities under Tipton—despite all these heroic efforts, the star of Franklin swiftly declined. The vigorous measures pursued by General Joseph Martin, and his effective influence focussed upon a movement already honey-combed ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... Countess J—— all the time. She was privately married. For certain family reasons the Count had conditioned that their union should for a while be kept secret. Seeing that her equivocal position and her mother's displeasure preyed upon her health and spirits, he declared his marriage. She left the stage to become a reigning beauty in the best society of Austria, lady of half a dozen castles, and sovereign mistress of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... 'solemn,' like a doctor in his robes; and 'fur' may be used figuratively in the sense of sect, just as "the cloth" is used to denote the clergy. The whole phrase would thus be equivalent to 'solemn doctors of the Stoic sect.' It is possible that Milton makes equivocal reference to the two senses ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... question of equivocal generation, I have been compelled, more conspicuously and frequently than I could wish, during the last ten years, to enunciate exactly the same views as those put forward by Professor Virchow; ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... we find them sitting in church courts with these brethren, [47:1] and desirous to be known not as apostles, but as elders. [47:2] We possess little information respecting either their official or their personal history. A very equivocal, and sometimes contradictory, tradition [47:3] is the only guide which even professes to point out to us where the greater number of them laboured; and the same witness is the only voucher for the statements which ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... with such ease and cheapness over the whole surface of the land as no longer to require that close local relation which means overcrowding in work and in home life. If science could do this it would confer upon humanity an advantage far less equivocal than that which belongs to the present reign ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... Massachusetts Bay. The illusion was gone,—the ignis-fatuus of adventure, the dream of wealth. The rugged wilderness offered only a stern and hard-won independence. In their own hearts, not in the promptings of a great leader or the patronage of an equivocal government, their enterprise found its birth and its achievement. They were of the boldest, the most earnest of their sect. There were such among the French disciples of Calvin; but no Mayflower ever sailed from a port of France. Coligny's colonists were of a different stamp, and widely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Nitrate of Silver in the Treatment of Zona or Shingles. 28, On the Remedial Effects of Camphor in Acute and Chronic Rheumatism. 29, Examination of the Question, whether the Medical Use of Phosphorus internally, is useful, injurious, or equivocal. 30, Nitrous Acid and Opium in Dysentery, Cholera and Diarrhoea. 31, Tartar Emetic in Pneumonia Biliosa. 32, Bark of the Ampelopsis in Catarrhal Consumption. 33, Obstinate Vomiting cured with Extract of Marigold. 34, Vomiting of Fat and Blood. 35, Rupture of the Spleen. 36, ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... do not well know what to say. The subject of them seems to be somewhat equivocal; but many of them are highly beautiful in themselves, and interesting as they relate to the state of the personal feelings of the author. The following are some ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... frequent and intricate discussions, sufficiently denoting the indeterminate limits by which they are respectively circumscribed. All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... highest pieces of divinity. The severe schools shall never laugh me out of the philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, where- in, as in a portrait, things are not truly, but in equivocal shapes, and as they counterfeit some real substance in that ...
— Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and the Letter to a Friend • Sir Thomas Browne
... said quite frankly, 'I cannot deny that I have seen him often and with pleasure; but I have always treated him as a child, and my affection for him was truly that of a sister. In many cases I have given him good advice; and, instead of instigating him to any equivocal action, I have hindered him from taking part in wanton tricks, which might have ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... conclusions drawn from such tables; but it is in the highest degree probable that they would be much modified by more numerous series of observations, at different stations within narrow limits. [Footnote: The nomenclature of meteorology is vague and sometimes equivocal. Not long since, it was suspected that the observers reporting to a scientific institution did not agree in their understanding of the mode of expressing the direction of the wind prescribed by their ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... girls who have themselves had experience of the marriage bed are said to detect the virgin. The virgin's eyes are cast down and almost motionless, while she who has known a man has eyes that are bright and quick. But this sign is equivocal, says Schurig, for girls are different, and can simulate the modesty they do not feel. Yet this indication also rests on a fundamentally sound psychological basis. (See "The Evolution of Modesty," in the first volume ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... but as it were reincarnations of the original, the spirit or the flesh (whichever anyone pleases) being his own, or both being blended of his and the author's. To do this requires a "strong nativity" though not in the equivocal sense in which another great translator of FitzGerald's own type[39] used that term. It shows in his scanty "original" work: but it shows also and perhaps more strongly in his letters. Everyone who has studied the ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... with the greatest freedom, yet with the utmost decency; not a single equivocal word, not one attempt at double-meaning pleasantry; yet this delicacy was not affected, we only performed the parts our hearts dictated; in short, my modesty, some will say my folly, was such that the ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... opposition. It will not be doing him injustice to say, that, besides the little underhand intrigues which he is frequently practising, there has hardly been any great military question, in which his advice has been asked, that it has not been given in an equivocal and designing manner, apparently calculated to afford him an opportunity of censuring me, on the failure of whatever measures might ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... Feng Yao bridge, Hsiao Hung makes known sentimental matters in equivocal language. In the Hsiao Hsiang lodge, Tai-y gives, while under the effects of the spring lassitude, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... than for his own achievements in the troubadours' art. He was a follower of the precious, artificial and obscure style, and prided himself upon his skill in the combination of difficult rimes and the repetition of equivocal rimes (the same word used in different senses or grammatical forms). "Since Adam ate the apple," he says, "there is no poet, loud as [65] he may proclaim himself, whose art is worth a turnip compared with mine." ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... voices to admonish him that all this was not really action at all, but only a pusillanimous imitation of it: one of them fitfully audible in the depths of his own spirit and the other speaking, in the equivocal accents of a very crabbed hand, from a letter of four pages by Gabriel Nash. However, Nick carried the imitation as far as possible, and the flood of sound floated him. What more could a working faith have done? He had not broken with the axiom that in a case of doubt ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... you marry me now, if I asked you?" said Stephen. He did not realize the equivocal form of his question. An indignant look swept over Mercy's face for a moment, but only for a moment. She ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... living things, which he called monads, were continually coming into the world and that there were different kinds of these monads for each primary division of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. This last hypothesis does not seem essentially different from the old doctrine of equivocal or spontaneous generation; it is wholly unsupported by any modern experiments or observation, and therefore affords us no aid whatever in speculating on the commencement of vital ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
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