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More "Impassive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of his back. The beating of his heart did not manifest itself outwardly after all. To her gaze he appeared as impassive, as quiet, as motionless, as if he had been cut out of iron like the grated bars. It was a most unsatisfactory beginning to what must prove an important interview. They played at cross purposes indeed. He had sacrificed himself to save her, she had sacrificed herself to save ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... other three also have their eyes upon it, though with very different expressions. That upon the face of the Irishman is of sadness, as if for the loss of an old shipmate; the Malay looks on with the impassive tranquillity peculiar to his race; while in the sunken orbs of the nondescript can be detected a look that speaks of a horrible ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... The usually impassive Indian now seemed in his element. His sullen eyes lit up with a true hunter's love of the chase, when the danger is not all on one side, and only the confidence of greater skill and superior weapons overcomes the sense of personal peril. ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... the doctor; to lie down in some safe place Solitude and every desirable discomfort Stumbled against an ill-placed tree Suffering when unaccompanied by resignation Ten times harder to unlearn anything than it is to learn it There is an impassive, stolid ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... Bernheimer, and a light crept into his ordinarily impassive eye. At the same time, West's ordinarily ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... United States glutted their eyes upon them. Mr. Latham's face went deathly white from sheer excitement, the German's violently red from the same emotion, and the others—there was amazement, admiration, awe in them. Mr. Czenki's countenance was again impassive. ...
— The Diamond Master • Jacques Futrelle
... longer guide. Bell took his place; he was not well, but was obliged not to give in. The doctor also felt the influence of his terrible winter excursion, but he did not utter a complaint; he marched on in front, leaning on his stick; he lighted the way; he helped in everything. Hatteras, impassive, impenetrable, insensible, in as good health as the first day, with his iron constitution, followed the sledge in silence. On the 20th of January the weather was so bad that the least effort caused immediate prostration; but the difficulties of the ground ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... the desk resoundingly with his open palm, and then, observing that Bibbs remained in the same impassive attitude, with his eyes still fixed upon the ceiling in a contemplation somewhat plaintive, Sheridan was impelled to groan. "Oh, Lord!" he said. "This is the way you always were. I don't believe you understood a darn word I been sayin'! ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... to sit in front with the chauffeur, and rather astonished that impassive factotum by asking ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... over the man watching him. He did not appear altogether human, he seemed rather like some perfectly adjusted machine, able to think and plan, yet as unemotional as so much tempered steel. There was no perceptible change passing in that utterly impassive face, no brightening of those cold, observant eyes, no faintest movement of the tightly compressed lips. It was as though he wore a mask completely eclipsing every natural human feeling. Twice Winston, observing ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... and I thought of going nearer to her in case she should fall, but refrained when I noticed that Maitland had noiselessly glided within easy reach of her. To move seemed impossible to me. Such a sudden transition from warm, vigorous life to cold, impassive death seems to chill the dynamic rivers of being into a horrible winter, static and eternal. Though death puts all things in the past tense, even we physicians cannot but be strangely moved when the soul thus hastily deserts the body without ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... the Minor Canon's nature, he doubtless displayed openly that he would at any time have revived the subject, and even desired to discuss it. The determined reticence of Jasper, however, was not to be so approached. Impassive, moody, solitary, resolute, so concentrated on one idea, and on its attendant fixed purpose, that he would share it with no fellow- creature, he lived apart from human life. Constantly exercising an Art which brought him ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... premonition of that dreadful morning when, as he crouched in a corner of 'his burning home, fifty daggers were to rasp against each other in his body. He sunk his face in his hands, and a shudder passed over his gaunt frame. Then he rose, and folding his arms, he resumed his impassive attitude. Louis took up the pen from the table, and drew ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... door at the forward end of the saloon opened. I turned in my seat and saw framed in the doorway the towering figure of the head butler. I faced his impassive glance, and received the full shock of his calm but incredible announcement: "Mr. ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... at all, it means that He so knits Himself with us as that all which touches us touches Him, that He takes a share in all our pressing duties, and feels the reflection from all our sorrows and pains. We have no impassive God in the heavens, careless of mankind, nor is His settled and changeless and unshaded blessedness of such a sort as that there cannot pass across it—if I may not say a shadow, I may at least say—a ripple from men's pangs and troubles ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... any one, unless, indeed, her father occasionally, and her maid Alley Mahon, when her attendance was necessary. She became pale as a shadow, began to have a wasted appearance, and the very fountains of her heart seemed to have dried up, for she found it impossible to shed a tear. A dry, cold, impassive agony, silent, insidious, and exhausting, appeared to absorb the very elements of life, and reduce her to a condition of such physical and morbid incapacity as to feel an utter inability, or at all ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... of Montague sat Somers, lord keeper; older, of more steady demeanor, of fuller figure, of bold face and full light eye, a politician, not a ponderer. At the right of Montague, grave, silent, impassive, now and again turning a contemplative eye about him, sat that great man. Sir Isaac Newton, known then to every nobleman, and now to every schoolboy, of the world. A gem-like mind, keen, clear, hard and brilliant, exact in every facet, and forsooth held in the setting of an iron body. Gentle, ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough
... conscious wavering in his purpose. But from much dwelling upon the thought, from much effort rather to put it away, his desire only to see her grew stronger day by day. He had no fear. He longed to test himself. He was sure that he would be impassive, and be all the stronger for the test. He was more devoted than ever in his Work. He was more severe with himself, more charitable to others, and he could not doubt that he was gaining a hold-yes, a real hold-upon the lives ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... on the social and moral plane, the more necessary to emphasize the distinction between the races. Kwong used to listen, imperturbable, thinking his own thoughts. When his master beat him, he submitted. His impassive face expressed no emotion, neither assent ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... of this garden at the edge of the Nile a storm was surging up within her. And Baroudi sat there at her feet, impassive, immobile, with his still, luminous eyes always steadily ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... the window, in such a fever of agitation that great beads of sweat came out on his forehead, and his hands shook. Berger Sven Persson sat on the sofa at the far end of the room, twiddling his thumbs, his hands clasped over his stomach, his big commanding face impassive. ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... the officer who had remained silent throughout came forward a step and spoke. He was a magnificent man with the physique of a Hercules. He had remained on his feet, impassive but observant, from the moment of his entrance. His voice had that soft quality peculiar ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... The impassive man thus addressed looked neither gay nor sad. His little eyes wandered to Fanny with a faint critical indifference. ("Julien has made a mistake, a mistake! He is an enemy!") She could not clearly decide how much she should allow her evening to be shadowed by ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... and Mrs. Duncan found her an hour afterward, basting the fowls with a skewer, while the iron ladle lay at her feet, and with a stony, impassive expression on her face which always meant ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his remarks there was a long silence. The general sat impassive, looking into the man's face, but apparently not attentive to what had been said. It was as if his eyes had mounted guard over the prisoner while his mind concerned itself with other matters. Presently he drew a long, deep breath, shuddered, as one awakened from a dreadful dream, and exclaimed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... be more intensely imagined than it is in the poem of the French camp, and all is made more real and vivid by the presence of that motionless figure, intent on victory and sustaining the weight of imperial anxieties, which yet cannot be quite impassive in presence of a death so devoted. And side by side with this poem of generous enthusiasm is placed the poem of passion reduced to its extreme of meanness, its most contracted form of petty spite and base envy—the Soliloquy ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... accident then—now it looks like a murder attempt. The slugs from the gun must be in the building—embedded in the plasterwork somewhere. Surely you could try to trace the gun." He glared at the man's impassive face bitterly, "Or maybe you don't want to trace ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... over Revolution Square. This vast expanse was soon covered by an ocean of soft hats, and the crowd of demonstrators, continually increased by sight-seers, having crossed the bridge, struck its dark wave against the walls of the legislative enclosure. Cries, murmurs, and songs went up to the impassive sky. "It is Chatillon we want!" "Down with the Deputies!" "Down with the Republicans!" "Death to the Republicans!" The devoted band of Dracophils, led by Prince des Boscenos, struck up the ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... impassive on the teleceiver screen, Commander Walters listened to Strong's report, and when the Solar Guard officer finished, he ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... Boris let himself be led away. Something in Fred's look, or in his voice, had warned him not to say anything more. So Fred saw him go, and was taken himself to the guard room, of which he was the only occupant save for the impassive Pomeranian sentry. Fred guessed, somehow, that German soldiers in war time did not often do things that caused them to be put under arrest. In the little he had seen of them he had come to understand what it was that made ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine
... interpretation the Chief stood by him, his usually impassive face quite lit up with animated interest. After a while he played to us on his cornet, his favourite tune being 'God save the Queen.' Mr. Needham told us a few deeply interesting details of his work among the Indians, and how the Lord is giving His blessing ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... his dead uncle for no more than a minute. His face was impassive, almost stern as he turned to the others. He nodded slightly to Mr. Tertius and to Selwood; then he gave his ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... expanse of the most delicious level green, and found that the cow had protected herself against all winged adversaries by standing in the creek up to her throat in the cool water, where she chewed the cud tranquilly, and contemplated with an impassive countenance the construction of a canoe at a little distance by two red men and their squaws. Andy paused and ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... suggested a degree of offended pride, and she was truly humiliated that her vaunted hazel eyes had so signally failed to work their wonted charm. As they strolled back together up the steep path to the hotel he seemed either unobservant or uncaring, so impassive were his manners, and she was aware that her demonstration had resulted in giving him information which he could not otherwise have gained. Later, she was nettled to notice that he had utilized it in prosaic fashion, for that night no lights ...
— The Lost Guidon - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... Armes to havoc hewn, And cloudie in aspect thus answering spake. 450 Deliverer from new Lords, leader to free Enjoyment of our right as Gods; yet hard For Gods, and too unequal work we find Against unequal armes to fight in paine, Against unpaind, impassive; from which evil Ruin must needs ensue; for what availes Valour or strength, though matchless, quelld with pain Which all subdues, and makes remiss the hands Of Mightiest. Sense of pleasure we may well Spare out of life perhaps, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... of hoof; By stream or hedge-row plucked no pansies more, Mistrusting Proserpina's cruel fate, Herself up-gathered in Sicilian fields; At chapel—for one needs to chapel go A-Sunday—glanced not either right or left, But with black eyelash wedded to white cheek Knelt there impassive, like the marble girl That at the foot-end of his father's tomb, Inside the chancel where the Wyndhams lay, Through the long years ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... heads of that crowd of brokers like steam through a boiler, now hot, now cold, but always at high pressure, for upon the correctness of the answers depended the fortune of many who breathlessly awaited the renewal or the suspension of the contest. Even Barry Conant's usually impassive face wore ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... here and there with a note or to post a letter; a servant to whisk away a plate and replenish the crystal glass with pearl-beaded wine without sign from the drinker, and appear like a bidden ghost, clad in speckless white, silent and impassive of face, behind his master's chair at the table when he dines out; everything in fact beyond the mental whirl of the brain to be arranged by one or ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... himself. I bowed slightly on my side of the table, and told him I commanded a merchant vessel at present anchored in Rushcutters' Bay. He had "remarked" her,—a pretty little craft. He was very civil about it in his impassive way. I even fancy he went the length of tilting his head in compliment as he repeated, breathing visibly the while, "Ah, yes. A little craft painted black—very pretty—very pretty (tres coquet)." After a time he twisted his body slowly to face the glass ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... demanded one of the hold-ups, wheeling savagely on the impassive officer "Did I say we were going to bother the lady? Who's ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... in which he happens to be when the effect is produced, whether sitting, standing, kneeling, or the like; and this face has an expression of fear. The arms or legs may be raised, but if left to themselves will not drop, as in lethargy. The eyes are wide open, but the look is fixed and impassive. The fixed position lasts only a few minutes, however, when the subject returns to a position of relaxation, or drops back into the ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... the finding and the sentence were read by Blenkin and duly translated by the interpreter. Pumpenheim was quite impassive, and maintained his composure throughout the small financial transaction which followed. He counted out his notes with an air of fatalism. Having obtained a receipt for the fine he made us a little bow and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... colored, and then was impassive again, all in an instant and so prettily, that John gave her his heartiest admiration even while chafed with new doubts ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... the elder, who handled the cards. The younger, standing behind his brother, talked unceasingly, with the air of giving infallible counsel. When the silent brother won, the loquacious brother's eyes gleamed; but at a loss, he raised despairing eyes heavenward. The Abbate, impassive for the most part, occasionally enunciated some scrap of proverbial wisdom. For instance: "Luck and women cannot be constrained." Or, "The earth is round, and heaven is far away." At times he looked at Casanova with an air of sly encouragement, his eyes moving on from Casanova to ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... there was no recognition in it—only the instinctive tribute that a man of the world and a gallant Russian is ever prone to pay at the sight of an unusually charming member of the other sex. Then, once more impassive—a striking handsome figure—he moved leisurely down and out of the gardens. The couple, engrossed at the time in a conversation of some intimate nature or in each other, had not even seen or noticed ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... without change of pose, no line of the impassive face altering, shot out a large, muscular hand, seized that of Paul Harley in a tremendous grip, and almost instantly put his hand behind his back again. "Had no plans," he replied, in a high, monotonous voice; "I was bored stiff. ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... the face of his step-mother, or the woman whom he had regarded as such, but he could read nothing to contradict the story in her calm, impassive countenance. A great fear fell upon him that she might be telling the truth. His features showed his contending emotions. But he had a profound distrust as well as dislike of his step-mother, and he could not bring himself to put confidence ...
— The Errand Boy • Horatio Alger
... not been able to hide his feelings from his friends so much as he would have wished. The stoical soldier, the impassive man-at-arms, overcome by fear and sad presentiments, had yielded, for a few moments, to human weakness. When, therefore, he had silenced his heart and calmed the agitation of his nerves, turning ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and so were the lower windows, but in one of the upper casements a movement was perceptible, and in another instant there came into view a woman and man, supporting between them the impassive form of Agatha's husband. Holding him up in plain sight of the almost breathless throng below, the woman pointed to where his darling lay and appeared to say ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... follow with his eye the point of the District Attorney's finger to know upon whose name it had settled; and for a moment, surprise, shock,—the greatest which can befall a man,—struggled with countless other emotions in his usually impassive countenance. Then he regained his poise, and with a curiously sarcastic smile such as his lips had seldom shown, ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... but he had never before suspected his father of cowardice. His cousin Julius, whom he thoroughly disliked, was betraying a whole world of meaning in the scorn that leaped from his eyes, and there was no mistaking the thoughts that inspired the furious General and the impassive Greek. For the first time in his life, Alec despised Prince Michael. There was a quickening in his veins, a tingling at the roots of his hair, a tension of his muscles, at the repulsive notion that a Serene Highness might, after all, ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... the sickening vibration continued. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The swaying trees finished their dizzy dance, and the rocks that had seemed to be bowing to each other like so many mummers resumed their impassive attitudes. Their ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... a grimly humorous spectacle—the mourners, including the Commanding Officer and officiating clergy, taking hasty cover in a truly novel trench; while the central figure of the obsequies, sublimely indifferent to the Hun and all his frightfulness, lay on the grass outside, calm and impassive amid the ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... into his bedroom, and there remained unseen by any one for several days, partially opening the door only to receive food and other necessaries from her hands. When he did at last leave his room, the impassive calmness of manner habitual to him was quite restored, and he wrote a note in answer to one that had been sent by Mademoiselle de la Tour, expressive of her extreme regret for what had occurred, and enclosing a very respectful ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... was perfect. She seemed so cold, so impassive, so completely mistress of the position, and all the time her heart was beating as the gambler's beats, albeit in winning vein, ere he lifts the box from off the imprisoned dice—as the lion-tamer's beats when he spurns in its very den the monster ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... Impassive as he was, and accustomed to show his feelings but little, Frederick was deeply affected at the loss of his trusted general, and of the splendid soldiers who had been so long and carefully trained; and even had Prague fallen, the victory ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... driving at. Was there, indeed, no test? Had the murderer used the safest of poisons—one that left no clue? I looked covertly at Sato's face. It was impassive. Doctor Bernardo was visibly uneasy as Kennedy proceeded. Cool enough up to the time of the mention of the treasure, I fancied, now, that he was growing more ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... they fell upon the floor knee-deep about her; she stepped out of them and walked across the old familiar living-room, with its long strips of worn rag-carpet, its old polished chairs, and smoky walls. The face of the eight-day clock stared hard at her with impassive yet kindly glance, but its voice only steadily recorded that the moments were passing one by one, like to ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea. In truth, from out of the sea he has leaped upon the back of the sea, and he is riding the sea that roars and bellows and cannot shake him from its back. But no frantic outreaching and balancing is his. He is impassive, motionless as a statue carved suddenly by some miracle out of the sea's depth from which he rose. And straight on toward shore he flies on his winged heels and the white crest of the breaker. There ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... insisted tactlessly, with her sweetest smile. But when Roy chose to be impassive pin-pricks were thrown away ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... to find a friend and protector in this curious and strange woman. Her eyes were moist and pleading—an appeal hard to resist. But Madame Cerise returned her scrutiny with a wholly impassive expression. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... to glance around. Wass, his broad face impassive except for the eyes—those burning madman's ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... sands. The Scotchman, Cuthbert Vane and I continued to sit by the dying fire. Mr. Shaw had got out his pipe and sat silently puffing at it. He might have been sitting in solitude on the topmost crag of the island, so remote seemed that impassive presence. Was it possible that ever, except in the sweet madness of a dream, I had been in his arms, pillowed and cherished there, that he had ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... hands and curtsied and threw their brightest glances at me. A torrent of red roses fell on me; one bloom lodged in my horse's mane, and I took it and stuck it in my coat. The Marshal smiled grimly. I had stolen some glances at his face, but he was too impassive to show me whether his sympathies were with ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... of the Embassy at Kabul was to all seeming perfectly friendly, and even cordial. Every honour was paid to it, and the assembled crowds, though preserving the impassive mien of Asiatics on such occasions, respectfully saluted the British officers as they passed along. It had been arranged that the members of the Embassy and escort should take up their abode in quarters prepared for them in the Bala Hissar, the celebrated fortress which ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... Only the Chief remained impassive. He never moved, but when the leaf was brought to him, he looked on the youth with a kindly smile. George was quick to notice this. He again walked over to the Chief, and placed the weapon in his hand, and guided his finger to the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... him better. Under the surface he was sensitive as a girl; one could wound him with a word or a look. Paradoxically, he was absolutely cold-blooded toward a declared enemy. He would fight fair, but without mercy. Side by side with the sensitive soul of him, and hidden always under an impassive mask of self-control, lay the battling spirit, an indomitable fighting streak; it cropped out in a cool, calculating manner of taking desperate chances when the sleeping devil in him was roused. He would sidestep trouble—and one met the weeping damsel at many turns ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Company's office constituted the cattle company. Moreover, they comprised the financial, political and general power of this remote section of New Mexico. In face, manner, garb, they were dissimilar. Vorse, clothed in gray, was hawk-nosed and impassive; and though now, like his companions, wealthy beyond simple needs he nevertheless continued the operation of his saloon that had been a landmark in San Mateo for forty years. Burkhardt was rough-featured, rough-tongued, choleric, and coatless: typically the burly, uncurried, uncouth stock ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... half-past three before the car came swooping up to the hotel doors. Jean gazed at it with a sort of fearful pride. It looked very well if only it didn't play them false. Stark, too, looked well—a fine, impassive figure. ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... a Tr'en over seven feet tall and correspondingly broad, sat in the great chair, his four fingers tapping gently on the table near him, staring at Korvin and his guards. The guards stood on either side of their captive, looking as impassive as jade statues, six and a half ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... enemy, without mercy to unseaworthy ships and faint- hearted seamen. In his kingly way he has taken but little account of lives sacrificed to his impulsive policy; he is a king with a double-edged sword bared in his right hand. The East Wind, an interloper in the dominions of Westerly weather, is an impassive- faced tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his back for a ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... midst of the hush of expectation, in that dead silence which is so peculiarly oppressive because it is possible only when many human beings are gathered together, Mr. Webster rose. He had sat impassive and immovable during all the preceding days, while the storm of argument and invective had beaten about his head. At last his time had come; and as he rose and stood forth, drawing himself up to his full height, his personal grandeur and his majestic calm thrilled all who looked upon him. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... mission, as far as possible, without friction. In this exercise of caution, Las Casas beheld weakness and even treachery. His passionate nature chafed and raged at the deliberateness with which these impassive monks moved, and he was not slow to denounce them as having been won over by the blandishments of the colonial officials to betray the mission with which they were entrusted. His passion for justice, associated as it was with unrealisable ideals, refused to take ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... our way to the train," answered Holmes. A moment later he and I were back in the front room, where the impassive lady was still quietly working away at her antimacassar. She put it down on her lap as we entered, and looked at us with her frank, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hatchway was suddenly thrown violently off, and the dripping head and shoulders of a man appearing right under his very nose startled Jan Steenbock so much that he tumbled backward on the deck, although, impassive as usual, he did ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... my things!" cried Marianne to the Chintz Imp, but he remained rigidly against his shiny spotted background and refused to move, though Marianne thought she saw a twinkle in his eye, which showed he was not quite so impassive as ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... as cold and impassive as the carved image, stared at it without speaking, his forehead divided by a straight fold wherein his courtiers alone could read his wrath; then, after a few words spoken rapidly in Arabic, to order his carriages and collect ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... witnessed generous and fine school-girl natures dwarfed, cabined, confined; cheated of the activities which they had learned to desire to exercise, becoming individualistic, and therefore commonplace; not without inward fury and resistance, secret remonstrance, but concealing it all under the impassive manner which ...
— Three Addresses to Girls at School • James Maurice Wilson
... all dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with "the tranquil inauguration" of elective industrial governments throughout the world. So history moves doggedly on, propheten rechts, propheten links, a perfectly impassive welt-kind in the middle of them. In Copenhagen Ibsen had, after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a long and dangerous illness; and all he could do was to exchange letters with this still unseen but increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend. To Brandes Ibsen wrote more freely ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... this small expedition when it started for Chattanooga. They were under the command of Andrews, who was a tall, handsome man with a long black beard. He was cold, impassive, and had the air of one who is born to command. He was bold as a lion, and never once lost his coolness, his firmness, or his decision. He and his men pretended to be Kentuckians who had become disgusted with the Lincoln government and were making their way South, where they might find more ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... and prejudiced public, was more torturing than the pangs of Marsyas; and she wondered whether a courageous Roman captive who was shorn of his eyelids, and set under the blistering sun of Africa, suffered any more keenly; but motionless, apparently impassive as a stone mask, on whose features pitiless storms beat in vain, she bore without wincing the agony of her humiliation. Very white and still, she sat hour by hour with downcast eyes, and folded hands; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... at Lowell. He was impassive as her questioning eyes searched his face. Amazement and concern alternated in her features. Then she took refuge in a blaze ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... of the hotel servants whom Klarnood had gathered up now became apparent; they advanced, took the body of Marnark by the heels, and dragged it out of the way. The others watched this removal with mixed emotions. The two remaining principals were impassive and frozen-faced. Their two Assassins, who had probably bet heavily on Marnark, were chagrined. And Klarnood was looking at Verkan Vall with a considerable accretion of respect. Verkan Vall pulled on his boots and resumed ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... are hatefully quiet and impassive, just like—ah, like all your race! Are you always so cold and still? Have you no blood ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... to the world of Nature, and think of the panoramic scenes that have passed before those now impassive eyes. In our friend's boyhood there was no practical mode of swift communication of news. In great emergencies, to be sure, some patriot hand might flash the beacon-light from a lofty tower; but news crept slowly over our hand-breath nation, and it was months ...
— The New Minister's Great Opportunity - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... go. Never in her life had she worked so hard to make conversation as she did in the next ten minutes. The "Argus," the new chapel rules, Miss Raymond and her theme classes, the sophomore elections,—none of them evoked a responsive chord in the strange girl who sat impassive, with no thought apparently of her social duties ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... any woman's; it was the monster's chiefest charm. However well one knew the fellow's neutral sex, as soon as one looked at his breast one felt all aglow and quite madly amorous of him. To feel nothing one would have to be as cold and impassive as a German. As he walked the boards, waiting for the refrain of the air he was singing, there was something grandly voluptuous about him; and as he glanced towards the boxes, his black eyes, at once tender and modest, ravished the heart. He evidently wished to fan the flame of those ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the applause came crashing down from the galleries, up from the floor, in from the boxes, focussing itself from all sides upon that single, lonely, dominant figure before it. And Cotton Mather Thayer, as he listened with a quiet, impassive face, felt his heart leaping and bounding within him. He knew, by an instinct which he had learned to trust completely, that in the years to come, he would never reach a greater height of artistic success than he had done just then. One such experience could justify many a year of halting indecision. ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... tribe he remained silent and impassive; his days were spent in smoking, his evenings in quiet contemplation; he spoke not of his adventures in the land of the great white medicine-man. But at length the tribe grew discontented; they had expected to hear the recital of the wonders ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... only to drive hard bargains and exchange mildewed flour and shoddy blankets for their fish and furs. I am afraid they regarded these raids of Christian civilization as they looked upon grasshopper plagues, famines, inundations, and epidemics; while an utterly impassive God washed his hands of the means he had employed, and even encouraged the faithful to resist and overcome his emissaries—the white devils! Had Elijah Martin been a student of theology, he would have been struck with the singular resemblance of these theories—although the application thereof ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... did an unusual thing. He took the lamp from Brother Dino's hand and threw the light suddenly upon the young man's impassive countenance. Dino raised his great, serious eyes to the Prior's face, and then dropped them to the ground. Otherwise not a muscle of his face moved. He was the ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... his generally impassive, well-bronzed features, as his eye fell on the lady whom I indicated. "Yes," he answered, with a firm voice, "that lady is Miss Blanche Norman, the daughter of Major Norman, who is out here for his health. But wouldn't you like to ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... Frederica Fish had nothing to do but to stand as she was put, and Mrs. Sandford had seen to it that she stood right; another person might have done more in the picture, but that was all that could be got from Frederica. Her face was coldly impassive; she could come no nearer to the expression of the indignant queen. But Preston's old woman, and Theresa's pretty young French girl; one looking as he had said, with eyes of coarse fury, the other all melting with tenderness and reverent sympathy; they were so excellent that the company ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... deliberate; in civil life probably a drayman. JIM—Small, lean, sallow, grey-eyed, with a kind of quiet restlessness; in civil life probably a mechanic with leanings towards Socialism. POZZIE—A thick-set, low-browed, impassive, silent country youth, with a face the colour of the soil. JINKS—An old soldier, red, lean, wrinkled, with very blue eyes. His face is rough-hewn, almost grotesque like a gargoyle. In his eyes there ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... to this long narrative with an intentness which showed me that his interest was keenly aroused. His face was as impassive as ever, but his lids had drooped more heavily over his eyes, and his smoke had curled up more thickly from his pipe to emphasize each curious episode in the doctor's tale. As our visitor concluded, Holmes sprang up without ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... scornful gravity, kept silence, as though he did not understand and as though waiting for the explanation to which he felt himself entitled. And, in spite of everything, this impassive attitude worried Arsene Lupin. Nevertheless, his conviction was so profound and, besides, he had staked so much on the ...
— The Confessions of Arsene Lupin • Maurice Leblanc
... is one of those calm, impassive men, who shows little upon the surface, and whose feelings you have always thought cold. But now there is a tremulousness in his tones that you never remember observing before. He seems conscious of it himself, and forbears talking. He goes ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... that I was near by," he said, "at the moment of the encounter. I had taken my stand near a large beach-chair, which, for reasons, interested me. I was nonchalant, impassive; alert, without seeming to be so. Many of the women passing I had met upon the boulevards under circumstances the most peculiar; concerning many of the men I knew more than they would wish the world to know. Seeing me standing there, ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... telegraph, being out of order, no longer tells her of the shaking of the web. The captured prey is too far off for her to see it; she is all unwitting. A good hour passes, with the Locust still kicking, the Spider impassive, myself watching. Nevertheless, in the end, the Epeira wakes up: no longer feeling the signalling-thread, broken by my scissors, as taut as usual under her legs, she comes to look into the state of things. The web is reached, without the least difficulty, by one of the lines of the framework, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... office would be watching him for signs of anguish. His machine steadily clicked off the item. He struck not one wrong letter. He hung the sheet of copy on its hook and waited for the explosion of crude humour. He felt that his impassive demeanour had foiled the mean intention. But no one regarded him. Sam Pickering wrote on. Terry Stamper stolidly ran off cards on the job press. They were all indifferent. Something told him it ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... on the topmost branches of the forest. Close under the protecting river-bank sped our light canoes, cutting their way through the gray waters. The dark-skinned crews bent to the paddle silently, with corded muscles tightening in their lean brown arms, and still, impassive faces fixed upon the seething current ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... could only stare, puffing in his beard, and drawing in his legs, which had been spread out at angles. He looked from Wiley to the impassive Pierre. "Buccaneers, you callus," Wiley went on; "well, we'll have no more of that, or there'll ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... was perfectly impassive, I never felt quite sure whether this was for the benefit of myself or of the astounded footman; or whether it was the genuine expression of an absent mind. He was a great friend of my mother's, and of Mr. Ellice's, but his ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... from the upper deck and obliged him to conduct us to the magazine, and there, sure enough, was Frey Bartolomeo, calm and impassive as ever. He had stove in the head of one barrel of gunpowder, and now stood over the powder holding a lighted candle in his hand. As we burst in the door and confronted him, he raised his pale face and regarded us with calmness ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... your enlightened courtesy, accept, and overlook the deficiencies of, a portion of rabbit-pie, O high-souled Mr. Kong?" she inquired gracefully when this insignificant person was reached, and, concealing my many-hued emotion beneath an impassive face, I bowed agreeably as I replied, "To the beggar, black ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... a separate race, with its own patois, in Monaco. You would never spot it in the somewhat Teutonic cosmopolitanism of the Condamine and Monte Carlo tradesmen and hotel servants. It is not apparent in the impassive croupiers of the Casino. But within a few hundred yards, in half a dozen streets and lanes, the physiognomy, the mentality, the language of the people make you realize that regarding Monaco as a separate country is not ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... suspense equally trying, but he made no remark, and there was nothing to be learned from Clarke's impassive face. Harding could only wait with all the fortitude he could muster; but he long remembered that momentous hour. They were all perfectly still; there was no wind, a heavy gray sky overhung them, and the smoke of the fire went straight up. The gurgle of running water ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... him and went out. Durtal raised himself up after his tears; what he feared so much had happened; the monk who would take him in hand was impassive, almost dumb. "Alas!" he thought, "my abscesses are ripe, but it needs the cut of a lancet to ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... without feeling, and necessarily makes no mistakes, nor is he led off from his own ambitions by sentiment of any kind. When we had that meeting with the strikers, he sat there, while all New York was seething, with mobs and dead just outside the walls, as cool and impassive as a machine. He was simply determined that we should compromise, because his own interests demanded it, and he carried his point merely because he was the one cool man at that meeting. If he had had feeling he could not have been cool. That one incident shows the key-note ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... remember in imitations of Kean's manner. Except that the copy was a little too apparent, Mr. Aldridge's acting was really very fine. The Russians were enthusiastic in their applause, though very few of them, probably, understood the language of the part. The Oriental auditors were perfectly impassive, and it was impossible to guess how ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... Quentin did not speak much of Lady Channice. He early saw that he would need to be discreet. One day at Lady Elliston's her beauty was in question and someone said that she was too pale and too impassive; and at that Quentin, smiling a little fiercely, remarked that she was as pale as a cowslip and as impassive as a young Madonna; the words pictured her; her fresh Spring-like quality, and the peace, as of some noble ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... brief altercation Wimp had come up. Even he could not make his face quite impassive, and there was a suppressed intensity in the eyes and a quiver about the mouth. He went in on Denzil's heels, blocking up the doorway with Grodman. The two men were so full of their coming coups that they struggled for some seconds, ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... something he did not want to do before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern), receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the feeling, as it were, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... . . Le jeu est fait! . . . Rien ne va plus! . . . Rouge gagne et la couleur! . . . Rouge gagne, la couleur perd! . . . Rouge perd et la couleur! . . . " Such were the monotonous continually recurring sentences, always spoken in the same impassive tones, to which I listened as I stood by the tables in the gaming-rooms of Monte Carlo. Such are the sentences to which devotees of the fickle goddess, Chance, listen hour after hour as the day wears itself out from early morning to late evening in that beautiful, cruel, enchanting earthly ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... fell, his face became impassive again, and he looked at me with so scornful, insolent and calm a glance, that my patience came to an end. I raised my hand, and gave him the best box on the ear I ever gave in my life. At the noise, the door opened, and my witnesses appeared solemn ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... in the kiss, that he thought she must needs feel it. Then, in a gust of anger at her insensibility, he shook her maiden form with a violence which, the next moment, it affrighted him to remember. He withdrew his encircling arms, and Alice—whose figure, though flexible, had been wholly impassive—relapsed into the same attitude as before these attempts to arouse her. Maule having shifted his position, her face was turned towards him slightly, but with what seemed to be a reference of her very slumber to ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the private sala there was no pause; the maid did not knock. No need, was there, at the door of an empty room? She led me straight across the anteroom and there in front of the curtain stood the impassive major-domo, the man who had led me there the first time. He was as still as a bronze. He did not even seem to see me, but stretching out his hand gathered up the velvet folds and drew the curtain a little to ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... however. When Graydon's name was mentioned he happened to glance up from the dinner which usually absorbed his attention. In dealing with men he had acquired the habit of keen observation. During a business transaction his impassive face and quiet eyes gave no evidence of his searching scrutiny. He not only heard and weighed the words to which he listened, but ever sought to follow the mental processes behind them; and often men had been perplexed by the fact that the banker had apparently ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... from time to time, the Elements mingle their awful voice in this concert of pain and despair, and we find hurricanes and floods, fires and earthquakes pile up colossal wreck and ruin in a few hours, on which scenes of destruction the morrow's calm and glorious sun sheds his impassive beams. ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... hundreds; but he knew the wonderful advantage to be gathered from the heightening of the mystery, and the intensifying of the excitement. He listened to everyone; but he maintained a gloomy and impassive silence, neither checking the aspirations of the annexationists, nor dissipating the ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... ring in Mr. Livingston's voice, and his words sounded very stirring to me; but I could not see that they made any impression on the impassive countenance of Monsieur Talleyrand. He was reclining in his garden-chair, and I could see that as Mr. Livingston spoke he was regarding him intently through half-shut eyes. His tones were of the sweetest and blandest as ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... of my breast! Sinks my heart to the dust, And the rain-drops of sorrow are watering the ground; So impassive to hear, never pierces my ear, Or briskly or slowly, the music of sound. For, what tidings can charm, while emotion is warm With the thought of my Prince on his travel unknown; The royal in blood, by misfortune ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Gower as she says this. Gower could have laughed too. There could, indeed, be hardly anything stranger than the scene as it stands—comedy and tragedy combined. The husband cold, impassive, stern, and over his shoulder the charming face of his little wife peeping—all ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... myself and these! But Pride reproves the wish; and—it is useless; The unatonable deeds of ages rise Like clouds between me and the throne of Grace. I may not hope,—or fear,—still unsubdued, As when I ruled the anarchy of Heaven, I stand in Fate's despite,—firm and impassive To all that Chance, and Time, and Ruin bring. —In that disastrous day, when this vast world Shall, like a tempest-shaken edifice, Rock into giant fractures—as the sound Of the Archangel's trump, upon the deep, Bids fall the bonds of nature, to let forth Destruction's formless fiend ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... be shunted out of Gregory's," supplemented MacNab, who, with impassive face, was lolling in a long chair, a silent but ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... long at each other. Then in a sudden impulse of gratitude, of generous feeling toward her, he put out his arm and drew her to him. She was cold, impassive. He bent over and lightly kissed her closed, unresponding lips. As he drew away, her hand caught his wrist for ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... senmorteco. Immovable senmova, nemovebla. Immutable nesxangxebla. Imp diableto. Impair difekti. Impart komuniki, sciigi. Impartial senpartia. Impartiality senpartieco. Impatience malpacienco. Impatient malpacienca. Impassive kvietega, stoika. Impeach kulpigi, denunci. Impediment baro. Impel antauxen pusxi. Impend minaci. Impenetrable nepenetrebla. Imperative ordona. Imperfect neperfekta. Imperfection difektajxo. Imperial imperia. Imperishable nepereema. Impermeable ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... a surprise awaited the two boys. The captain was stumping back and forth near the fire, his usually good-natured face nearly purple with suppressed anger, while, squatting on his heels before the fire, sat Indian Charley, his face impassive but his keen beady eyes watching the irate sailor's ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... in face of such a danger. The eminent advocate however, only succeeded in assuring those who were already assured of Darzac's innocence. At the adjournment Rouletabille had not yet arrived. Every time a door opened, all eyes there turned towards it and back to the manager of the "Epoque," who sat impassive in his place. When he once was feeling in his pocket a loud murmur ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... have begun. The dressmaker has come to receive her orders. Laura is perfectly impassive, perfectly careless about the question of all others in which a woman's personal interests are most closely bound up. She has left it all to the dressmaker and to me. If poor Hartright had been the baronet, and the husband of her father's choice, how differently she ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... was a lean, bitter man with a long, scraggy neck and nervous, jerky limbs, a man of incorruptible fidelity where the finances of the order were concerned, and with no notion of justice or honesty to anyone beyond. The treasurer, Carter, was a middle-aged man, with an impassive, rather sulky expression, and a yellow parchment skin. He was a capable organizer, and the actual details of nearly every outrage had sprung from his plotting brain. The two Willabys were men of action, tall, lithe young fellows with determined faces, while their ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... search at once. He examined the whole place minutely, foolishly it seemed to Christina, who stood by the door apparently impassive but following all his movements with her eyes. He was particularly careful in overhauling a coat that her father had worn, and having gone through the three rooms he walked out and round the house. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... at the thought of danger past. One by one the men stole cautiously along while we waited, watching with fascinated eyes, and drawing a deep breath of relief as each stepped safely from the perilous path. Whether they had also felt fearful I could not tell; their faces were wonderfully impassive, and, except when roused by ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... were sophistical and radically unsound; but he trusted that he was making them cogent. (Why is it that in dreams we feel no remorse for our sins, but only a terror lest we be found out? I cannot tell; but the best men and women of my acquaintance agree that it is so.) Mr. Fossell preserved an impassive, inscrutable face; but every time the Commandant ventured a new argument Mr. Fossell's high, bald head twinkled and suddenly changed colour like a chameleon. It was green, it was violet, it was bathed in a soft roseate glow like ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... faint color crept through the wrinkles on her forehead, and for a few moments she ceased to interrogate the child. But she spoke at length in the same impassive voice ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... massive figure of the black attendant, but he stood motionless and impassive, betraying no sign ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... nerves pleasurably in a manner of which it is impossible to give any idea. Yet in the midst of this heated riot, the cathedral choir felt cold as if it were a winter day, and I became aware of a multitude of women, robed in white, silent, and impassive, sitting there. The sweet incense smoke that arose from the censers was grateful to my soul. The tall wax candles flickered. The lectern, gay as a chanter undone by the treachery of wine, was skipping about like a peal of ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... clear-cut shadows cast by this forest of stone gradually shortening on the ground. The sun, which just now shone, all smiles and gaiety, upon the quay of the new town amid the uproar of the stall-keepers, the donkey drivers and the cosmopolitan passengers, casts here a sullen, impassive and consuming fire. And meanwhile the shadows shorten—and just as they do every day, beneath this sky which is never overcast, just as they have done for five and thirty centuries, these columns, these friezes and this temple ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... after daybreak when Mrs Lawford, after listening at his door a while, turned the key and looked in on her husband. Blue-grey light from between the venetian blinds just dusked the room. She stood in a bluish dressing-gown, her hand on her bosom, looking down on the lean impassive face. For the briefest instant her heart had leapt with an indescribable surmise; to fall dull as lead once more. Breathing equably and quietly, the strange figure lay stretched upon the bed. 'How ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... they stared, momentarily petrified, and then removed their hats—a performance as unusual to them as was the astonishing innovation presented to their gaze by "Big Jim". On the latter gentleman's impassive face there appeared a slight flicker of triumph—a faint flicker, no more to be observed than the expression called there by the draft of little casino to a ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... by a dozen troopers. Prescott recognized the faded blue uniform and knew at once that he was in the midst of Yankee horsemen. The girl beside him gave one start at the sudden apparition and then became calm and impassive. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... a voice at the open doorway of the cabin, and Captain Clubbe turned his impassive face toward Dormer Colville, who looked oddly white beneath the light ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... rousing choruses around the fires. There was, besides, an atmosphere of recklessness and gayety, engendered by excitement, by danger, by the very desperation of their cause, that could not long be resisted by even the most impassive recruit. Jack alone, of his whole party, remained indifferent and unmoved; but his wife, all of the savage in her rising to the surface, grew intoxicated almost to the point ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... four types of temperament given in the formal classification are represented among children in school. The choleric type is energetic, impulsive, quick-tempered, yet forgiving, interested in outward events. The phlegmatic type is impassive, unemotional, slow to anger, but not of great kindness, persistent in pursuing his purposes. The sanguine type is optimistic, impressionable, enthusiastic, but unsteady. The melancholic type is pessimistic, introspective, moody, suspicious ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... given her away with his impassive air of almost absurd distinction. It had been a gathering of quite unusual good looks, for Hyacinth had always chosen her friends almost unconsciously with a view to decorative effect, and there was great variety of attraction. There were bridesmaids in blue, choristers in red, tall women with ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... lizard where it lay, Impassive as the watcher's face; And only once in the long day It ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... her wrists in his anxiety not to hurt her unduly while he severed a stout rope, and he could not see the expression of sheer bewilderment which again mastered the usually impassive features of Abdullah. The Arab had yielded to unwonted surprise when he saw Royson use a man as flail, but the removal of the gag, and the consequent revelation of Irene's identity, nearly ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... deliberate and careful way and passed it in to the cashier, who had been noting the details of her appearance with unqualified interest. Her eyes had an increased brilliancy and there was a faint flush on her cheeks, but otherwise there was nothing in her impassive face to show how fast her heart was beating as she waited in the silence to learn if the blow she meant to strike had been well-timed ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... bowed his head silently. Then, turning his face to the door, he beckoned Tufnell to approach. The old servant advanced tremblingly into the room, vainly endeavouring to compose his horror-stricken face into a semblance of the impassive mask of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... her bridal day. She despised Linmere with her whole soul, she dreaded him inexpressibly, yet she scarcely gave her approaching marriage with him a single thought. She wondered that she did not; when she thought of it all, she was shocked to find herself so impassive. ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... than above the middle height; spare and sinewy; square in the shoulders and deep in the chest; with close-clipped hair and beard; grizzled moustache; high cheek-bones; stern impassive features, sharply cut; and deep-set restless eyes, quick and glancing as the eyes of a monkey. His face, throat, and hands were sunburnt to a deep copper-color, as if cast in bronze. His age might have been from forty-five to fifty. He wore a thread-bare frock-coat buttoned to the chin; ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the morning of the 22d. Our caravan consisted of three horses, three mules, and a donkey, in charge of two men—Dervish, an erect, black-bearded, and most impassive Mussulman, and Mustapha, who is the very picture of patience and good-nature. He was born with a smile on his face, and has never been able to change the expression. They are both masters of their art, and can load a mule with a speed and skill which I would defy ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... me if I stayed away; I found afterwards that she privately worshipped a shark. The chief himself was somewhat of a freethinker; at the least, a latitudinarian: he was a man, besides, filled with European knowledge and accomplishments; of an impassive, ironical habit; and I should as soon have expected superstition in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Hear the sequel. I had discovered by unmistakable signs that they buried too shallow in the village graveyard, and I took my friend, as the responsible authority, to task. 'There is something wrong ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was more meaning in them than was at first indicated; that to live there alone was something from which his sister recoiled. Standing before her, with his hand still upon her head, he remembered, that she had not always been as she was now, so quiet and impassive, with no smile upon her face, no joy in her dark eyes. As a young girl, in the days when he, too, lived at home, and slept under the rafters in the low-roofed house, she had been full of life and frolic, and played with ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... moment came for the king to bless the bridal pair, and there was no Lohengrin to bless, even the impassive Sir Cyril seemed likely to be disturbed, and you could hear murmurs of apprehension from all parts of the house. The conductor, however, went doggedly on, ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... impelled sober, impassive Tom to sit down for a few moments on the edge of the bunk ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... his tribe he remained silent and impassive; his days were spent in smoking, his evenings in quiet contemplation; he spoke not of his adventures in the land of the great white medicine-man. But at length the tribe grew discontented; they had expected to hear the recital of the wonders seen by their chief, and lo! he had ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... I held the window wide; she placed her hands on the sill and leaped lightly to the grass. I followed. Presently the lilac thicket parted and the tall Oneida appeared, leading my horse. One keen, cunning glance he gave at the girl, then, impassive, stood bolt upright beside my horse. He was superb, stripped naked to clout and moccasin, head shaved, body oiled and most elaborately painted; and on his broad breast glimmered the Wolf lined in sapphire-blue. When the long roll of the dead thundered through the council-house, ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... brilliant thought, or an indication of feeling different from, perhaps deeper than, anything which appeared before. When you believed you had learnt it line by line it would startle you by a phase quite new, and beautiful as new. For it was not one of your impassive faces, whose owners count it pride to harden into a mass of stone those lineaments which nature made as the flesh and blood representation of the man's soul. True, it had its reticences, its sacred disguises, its noble ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... the finger of his dead wife. She noticed in the strong light from the window how the smooth black hair had grown grey about the ears, how lines which had not been there before had graved themselves in the handsome, impassive face. Was he very unhappy too, Deleah wondered, in the midst of her own trouble? Did he still mourn, as they said he had done, so heavily, for ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... limbs and grim, impassive countenance, crouched the black-bearded beggar whose importunity had lured Ralph from her side the previous evening. His red-rimmed, sunken eyes gazed like the eyes of a dead man straight into the sunrise. So motionless were they, so utterly void of expression, that she thought they must be blind. ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... oblong, grey envelope," she said, the impassive, unwrinkled face unmoved to either curiosity ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... But impassive of his victory, he inflated his chest, with his right hand in the breast of his buttoned coat, and began. His usual high color had paled slightly, but the small pupils of his prominent eyes glittered like steel. The young girl leaned forward in her chair with an attention so breathless, ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... a covert look at Mr. Pless. He was gazing at the half-hidden box with a perfectly impassive face, and yet I knew that there was a smile ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... however, was not open to criticism. He walked calmly down the yard, and after entombing the dogs by the grape-arbor, he put four fingers of buckshot in his gun, rearranged his suspenders, shouldered arms and struck out for the front gate with a countenance as impassive as that ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... sunset, thither wends the fashionable world of Calcutta. The impassive European, with all the proud consciousness of a conquering race; the half-Europeanized baboo; the deposed rajah,—all may be seen driving to and fro in splendid equipages, drawn by handsome steeds, and followed by ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... "Dunciad;" but he had the fate of Cassandra. I gave no credit to his prediction, till in time I saw it accomplished. The shafts of satire were directed equally in vain against Cibber and Osborne; being repelled by the impenetrable impudence of one, and deadened by the impassive dulness of the other. Pope confessed his own pain by his anger; but he gave no pain to those who had provoked him. He was able to hurt none but himself; by transferring the same ridicule from one to another, he reduced himself to the insignificance of his own magpie, who ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... poetical are peculiarly susceptible to movement,—that is, to the excitement of numbers. If the movement is sincerely joyous, as in the mirth of a village holiday, such a nature shares insensibly in the joy; but if the movement is a false and spurious gayety, as in a state ball, where the impassive face and languid step are out of harmony with the evident object of the scene, then the nature we speak of feels chilled and dejected. Hence it really is that the more delicate and ideal order of minds soon grow inexpressibly weary of the hack routine of what are called fashionable pleasures. ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the border States—of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and possibly New Jersey. These are the States that are to suffer. Gentlemen from New York and the North East, in the bosom of their families, their towns and cities not in the least danger, may be as impassive as the granite rocks that bind their shores. We have a deeper, a more vital interest; therefore we feel and speak. When Pennsylvania received the invitation of Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, and other States had seceded. Dangers were accumulating. Then it was that the ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... chair legs and a shuffling of uneasy feet followed this exhortation; still no word from the huge, impassive figure in the central chair. The oily-faced young man behind the bar improved the opportunity by washing a dozen or so glasses, setting them down showily on a tin tray in view ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... wondering and amazed, as if the Last Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits. Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive faces, yet with a suspended—not an abolished—expression on them; faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... whether he had heard the news concerning Harry, and looked across at Mistress Mabel, but that stern, impassive face told nothing, and Mary's, in its proud resolve, no more; and she dared not utter the forbidden name before so many, and so went in search of the children, to ascertain from ...
— Hayslope Grange - A Tale of the Civil War • Emma Leslie
... His face impassive on the teleceiver screen, Commander Walters listened to Strong's report, and when the Solar Guard officer finished, he ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... and smart—has poor Nelly borne? Her grief has been so sore that she has torn her hair out by the roots in frenzy and stamped upon it; but Tom, surly and impassive Tom, is her lord as well as her most exacting master, and in their own way they ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... that, all about the fact that there was a diamond worth eighty thousand pounds at the bottom of these mysteries and murders. But he discharged his own duties, and watched Yada intently—and failed to see one single sign of anything beyond ordinary interest in his impassive face. ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... had nothing to do but to stand as she was put, and Mrs. Sandford had seen to it that she stood right; another person might have done more in the picture, but that was all that could be got from Frederica. Her face was coldly impassive; she could come no nearer to the expression of the indignant queen. But Preston's old woman, and Theresa's pretty young French girl; one looking as he had said, with eyes of coarse fury, the other all melting with tenderness and reverent sympathy; ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... secretary, was a lean, bitter man with a long, scraggy neck and nervous, jerky limbs, a man of incorruptible fidelity where the finances of the order were concerned, and with no notion of justice or honesty to anyone beyond. The treasurer, Carter, was a middle-aged man, with an impassive, rather sulky expression, and a yellow parchment skin. He was a capable organizer, and the actual details of nearly every outrage had sprung from his plotting brain. The two Willabys were men of action, tall, lithe young fellows with determined faces, while their companion, Tiger Cormac, a heavy, ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... soundly, dreaming that Ethie had returned, and on her knees was suing for his forgiveness, while her voice was broken with tears and choking sobs. As a man and husband who had been deserted, it was his duty to remain impassive a few moments, while Ethie atoned fully for her misdeeds: then he would forgive her, and so he waited an instant, and while he waited he woke to find only Andy, with whom he was sleeping, kneeling by the bedside, with the wintry moonlight falling on his ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... been any one to observe this solitary traveler, he would have said that the man gave no heed to the beauty of the day. Since he had broken camp his impassive gaze had been fixed for the most part on the ground in front of him. Occasionally he swung his long leg across the rump of the horse and dismounted to stoop down for a closer examination of the hoofprints he was following. They were not recent tracks. He happened to ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... girl, never came to her aunt's assistance. At the first fright she seemed slightly agitated, but she now sat impassive on her pony, and even ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... mind away from the subject, but he could not. The race was so very close, and the stakes were so very high. He then looked at the dying man's impassive, placid face. There was no sign there of death or disease; it was something thinner than of yore, somewhat grayer, and the deep lines of age more marked; but, as far as he could judge, life might yet hang ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... letters? Which is of most importance, character or incident or atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it that dramatized novels often fail in the theatre? Ought a novelist to take sides with his characters and against them, or ought he to suppress his own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist must? Does a prodigality in the invention of incidents reveal a greater imagination in the novelist than is required for the sincere depicting of simple characters in every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... independence should be attained, yet when the means of asserting these rights came to be discussed, he was still "Athelstane the Unready," slow, irresolute, procrastinating, and unenterprising. The warm and impassioned exhortations of Cedric had as little effect upon his impassive temper, as red-hot balls alighting in the water, which produce a little sound and smoke, and are ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... anything by way of talk; he nodded to the farmer, to his wife, to Sally and, when he chanced to be at home, to her brother, but he ventured nothing further. There he would sit from half past seven until nine o'clock, stolid, heavy, impassive, his dull eyes following now one of the family and now another, but always coming back again to Sally. It sometimes happened that she had other company—some of the young men of the neighborhood. The presence of such seemed to make no ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... it flashed upon Burton that there was more meaning in them than was at first indicated; that to live there alone was something from which his sister recoiled. Standing before her, with his hand still upon her head, he remembered, that she had not always been as she was now, so quiet and impassive, with no smile upon her face, no joy in her dark eyes. As a young girl, in the days when he, too, lived at home, and slept under the rafters in the low-roofed house, she had been full of life and frolic, and played with him all day long. She was very pretty then, and her ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... unbounded world; I tell thee that those viewless beings. Whose mansion is the smallest particle Of the impassive atmosphere, Think, feel, and live, like man: That their affections and antipathies, Like his, produce the laws Ruling their mortal state; And ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... There is Hume, the Scotch metaphysician, who has made out the best case for such people as never were, for a Charles who never died, for a Strafford who would never have been attainted; a saving, calculating North-country man, fat, impassive, who lived on eightpence a day. What have these people to do with an enjoying English gentleman? It is easy for a doctrinaire to bear a post-mortem examination,—it is much the same whether he be alive or dead; but not ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... and daring, had completely lost his nerve, and his teeth were chattering in his head. His father, on the other hand, was emotionless and impassive as ever. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a while, turned the key and looked in on her husband. Blue-grey light from between the venetian blinds just dusked the room. She stood in a bluish dressing-gown, her hand on her bosom, looking down on the lean impassive face. For the briefest instant her heart had leapt with an indescribable surmise; to fall dull as lead once more. Breathing equably and quietly, the strange figure lay stretched upon the bed. 'How can he sleep? How can he sleep?' she whispered with a black and hopeless indignation. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Dorian, further, dilated on the splendor of his female attire, satin corsets, low-cut evening gowns, etc., donned on gala nights to display his gleaming shoulders and dimpled, plump, white arms. Thus arrayed, he bantered, he would bewitch even me, now so impassive, until I should throw myself, in tears of happiness, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... With the lofty and generous sentiments so apparent in your nature, shall you remain impassive under ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... went by and no more news came from either front or rear—from the range to the north or Rock Springs at the south, and Flint was just formulating another fervid appeal to that impassive functionary, the adjutant general at Omaha, when toward evening word came whistling down the line in the person of Master Sanford Ray, that two couriers were in sight "scooting" in from Moccasin Ridge, and Flint ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... confounded. This implacably withered, sensible, dry woman, beneficently impassive in sickness and sorrow, weeping!—it was awful, as if one of the Fates had laid down ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... be heard rioting. Bees were humming around the clover in the grass, and the kingbird chattered ceaselessly from the Lombardy poplar tip. Both women felt all this peace and beauty of the morning dimly, and it disturbed Mrs. Councill because the other was so impassive under it all. At last, after a long and thoughtful pause, Mrs. Councill asked a question whose answer she knew would decide it all—asked it very kindly ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... water, decided against them, and the next moment I was three feet from the ground, among the low-spreading branches of a giant Paper-bark. Jackeroo was riding ahead, and flashed one swift, sidelong glance after me but as the mob trotted by he trotted with them as impassive as a statue. ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... with a formidable countenance he turned towards the impassive figure on the box. The advance was also a regular progression from high daring to craven hesitation. At last, when some yards from the monster, the lad came to a full halt, as if he had encountered a stone wall. The observant little ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... the impassive Mr. Juniper, "only I have been down among the 'orses at the yard till my throat is full of dust. So your lady has been and seen ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... ready, Sergeant?" I asked of the rather heavy-weight German who stood fronting me, his broad, red face as impassive as though carved ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... and meaningless, the uniforms of the officers mere servile livery. Their painted, immobile faces and plumed heads towered with grave dignity above the meaner crowd; their inscrutable eyes returned no response to the timid glances directed towards them. They stood by themselves, alone and impassive,—yet their presence filled the room with the sense of kings. The unostentatious, simple republican court suddenly seemed to have become royal. Even the interpreter who stood between their remote dignity and the nearer civilized world acquired the ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Eva Bernheimer, and a light crept into his ordinarily impassive eye. At the same time, West's ordinarily ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... him. An eager flush lit his still boyish face—Guy was twenty-eight—and his blue eyes were very bright. His lithe, muscular figure bent toward her pleadingly; all his arguments were aimed at her. Oliver sat back in his impassive way and watched them both. It could not be denied that it was Marian's decisions which usually ruled in matters of ...
— On Christmas Day in the Morning • Grace S. Richmond
... before his council. He had heard all his wise chiefs and his fiery warriors. Supreme was his power. Freedom or death for the captives awaited the wave of his hand. His impassive face gave not the slightest inkling of what to expect. Therefore the prisoners were forced to stand there with throbbing hearts while the chieftain waited the customary dignified ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... stillness round the bed; and the two medical attendants seemed to look on the impassive form with so much compassion and so little hope, that Mrs Chick was for the moment diverted from her purpose. But presently summoning courage, and what she called presence of mind, she sat down by ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... particle of air" called reason . . . He (the watchman) found Sherry in the street fuddled and bewildered, and almost insensible. "Who are you, sir?"—No answer. "What's your name?"—A hiccough. "What's your name?"—Answer, in a slow, deliberate, and impassive tone, "Wilberforce!" Is not that Sherry all over?—and, to my mind, excellent. Poor fellow, his very dregs are better than the "first ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... soon fishing beside him, Chamilly at one end of the skiff intent upon his sport. The old man's flat punt was littered with perch. How early he must have risen! He was small of figure, weathered of face, simple and impassive of manner. ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... enlightened courtesy, accept, and overlook the deficiencies of, a portion of rabbit-pie, O high-souled Mr. Kong?" she inquired gracefully when this insignificant person was reached, and, concealing my many-hued emotion beneath an impassive face, I bowed agreeably as I replied, "To the beggar, black ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... remembered that he was going to kill his victim, that all would be over, and that this would spare him the twenty-four hours of torture he intended for him. He then stood up, said a few words to the overseer, standing impassive, commanded him to watch closely over the prisoner, and went ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... nor spoke. The cracked old voice he had learned to love did not speak in relief, in that moment of unutterable suspense. Indeed, the silence seemed to deepen about him. The spruce trees were hushed and impassive as ever; the moon shone and the wind breathed softly in his face. Fenris came whimpering ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... as any diplomatist who ever left its portals. I was most desperately depressed. To begin with, I was in a complete funk. I had always thought I was about as brave as the average man, but there's courage and courage, and mine was certainly not the impassive kind. Stick me down in a trench and I could stand being shot at as well as most people, and my blood could get hot if it were given a chance. But I think I had too much imagination. I couldn't shake off the beastly forecasts ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... the aisle, looked at the dark walls; Max—modern, critical—looked up at the wondrous rose window, and felt the overshadowing power of superhuman things. The modern world crumbled before the impassive silence, criticism found no challenge in its brooding spirit, for the mind cannot analyze what it ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... buzz of excitement in the human hive, which the bailiff suppressed by a sharp rap of his gavel. Those who had caught the signal turned their eyes from Silvia to the large man, but there was nothing in his impassive ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... in a pocket which he had already searched half-a-dozen times. Now contrast the condition of this highly-civilized man, thrown into a painful flurry and confusion at the demand of a railway ticket, with the impassive coolness of a savage, who would not move a muscle if you hacked him ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... ridiculously at the first, received the second with a greater calm, keyed himself to almost motionless reception of the third, and managed to sit listening to the fourth with self-possession quite as great as theirs, his face impassive and his ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... caught for just a moment under the slight weight of his body. There was a short, snapping sound, but Oliver Symmes took no notice. His face remained impassive. Even pain had lost ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... barked; a wisp of smoke curled between the thatched huts, and one or two blanketed figures crept from the low doors. The simple yet secret lives of these people intrigued Christine deeply. She knew little of Kafirs, for she had been in Africa only a few months; but the impassive silence of them behind their watching, alert eyes always fascinated her. They said so little before their masters, the whites. Here, for instance, was a little colony of fifty or more people living in a ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... for a moment outside the window with his right hand extended to the sky and the moonlight blazing on his penknife—a truly formidable figure, and one which the princess never forgot; and then he walked slowly away, hiding behind a cold and impassive demeanour a mind that was tortured and a heart that had plumbed most of the depths ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... night could go no further. Don Miguel, with his swarthy face, and great sarape, was stalking about, rather out of humour, while the captain was regretting, in very polite tones, with his calm, Arab-looking, impassive face, that his escort could proceed no further. He seemed to think it extremely probable that we should be robbed, believed, indeed had just heard it asserted, that a party of ladrones were looking out for el Senor Ministro, regretted that he could not assist us, though quite at our ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... military coat, shining with countless amulets of gold. In the wild flaming sky burned the remnants of the storm which had just driven him back from Douabougou. So squatted King Dacha, and with royal impassive face, showing no mark of the boiling curiosity within, stared at those unknown animals, the swine. Hard on their heels shuffled Isaaco, himself also on all fours in a deep obeisance. Behind him the bearers of the inevitable bribes: ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... know what to do?" replied the Arab, with a look of unusual surprise on his impassive face. "How can that be? You have not yet seen the master; he loves you, and you have done that which he wished for most, you have conveyed his papers to the General. Go to him, he will tell you that ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... halt, and they found themselves surrounded by a dozen troopers. Prescott recognized the faded blue uniform and knew at once that he was in the midst of Yankee horsemen. The girl beside him gave one start at the sudden apparition and then became calm and impassive. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... tiny snowbird wit' broken wing. Bien! I fix her wing de bes' I can. I mak' her well an' I teach her to fly again. Dat's all." Broad and Bridges had listened attentively, their faces impassive. Lucky was ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... himself still more to seem impassive, he bowed to Orrin, and with great suavity remarked: "If she had chosen me to that honor, as I had every reason to believe she had, it would not have been many more weeks before I should have welcomed her into a home befitting her beauty and her ambition. May I ask if you ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... gray muzzle resting on the snow between his forepaws. He made no movement as David drew near, except that curious shivers ran through his body, and his throat twitched. Thoreau would have analyzed that impassive posture as one of waiting and watchful treachery; David saw in it a strange yearning, a deep fear, a hope. Baree, outlawed by man, battered and bleeding as he lay there, felt for perhaps the first time in his life the thrilling presence ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... with impassive features, as he bent forward and wiped the counter with professional deliberation, "is right. No matter how much a man may be accustomed all his life to liquor, when he is changing climate, gentlemen, he says 'Lemon soda for ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... now hot, now cold, but always at high pressure, for upon the correctness of the answers depended the fortune of many who breathlessly awaited the renewal or the suspension of the contest. Even Barry Conant's usually impassive face wore a tinge ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... of pain upon the features. They wore the calm, impassive look of marble. The eyes and mouth were wide open—efforts to close them had been in vain—but, there was no speculation in the former, and the soul played no more around the latter. The long brown hair, from which the water dripped, hung in disorder over the forehead and down the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... He had broken down the eternal division between East and West, coming himself from the continent that alone could produce such powers; he had prevailed by sheer force of personality over the two supreme tyrants of life religious fanaticism and party government. His influence over the impassive English was another miracle, yet he had also set on fire France, Germany, and Spain. Percy here described one or two of his little scenes, saying that it was like the vision of a god: and he quoted freely some of the titles given to the Man by sober, unhysterical newspapers. ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... there lies a great, lonely stretch of prairie land, gashed deep where flows the Missouri. Indeed, there are many such—big, impassive, impressive in their very loneliness, in summer given over to the winds and the meadow larks and to the shadows fleeing always over the hilltops. Wild range cattle feed there and grow sleek and fat ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... fascinating yet dangerous employment. She used to sit there in her impassive grace, as they talked, weighing every word, testing every sentiment, watching the expressions that flitted over Jack Darcy's countenance, until it went everywhere with her, the blue-gray eyes piercing the very depths of her soul. They ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... reflection, exaggerated in narration, and intensified by the repetition of a number of writers, come to constitute a body of public belief, not strictly rational in its birth or subsequent growth, but as impassive in its resistance to argument as it was innocent of mental process ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... that offer richer material for musical expression. Strauss has treated it with power and dexterity; he has preserved unity in this chaos of passions, by contrasting the Sehnsucht of man with the impassive strength of Nature. As for the boldness of his conceptions, I need hardly remind those who heard the poem at the Cirque d'ete of the intricate "Fugue of Knowledge," the trills of the wood wind and the trumpets that voice Zarathustra's laugh, the dance of the ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... glorious in his eyes. I told him stories enough to waken a sentry of reserve, and if it had been possible (with my youth so obvious) I would have woven in a few anecdotes of active service, and described great shells bursting under my horses and the teams shot down, and the gunners all the while impassive; but as I saw I should not be believed I did not speak of such things, but confined myself to what he would see and hear ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... stealthily down from the top of the stable and haled him into the office. He was very calm—quite impassive. Apparently he had never seen the woman before; as she raged he smiled cheerfully and shook ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... storm affording a vague vision of long ears of mules, of fluttering little green and white flags stuck upon each cart; of raised arms in a mob of sombreros with the white gleam of ranging eyes; and Don Pepe, hardly visible in the rear of that rattling dust trail, with a stiff seat and impassive face, rising and falling rhythmically on an ewe-necked silver-bitted black ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... lot I had last year. "The War'll be over soon." "What 'opes?" "No bloody fear!" Then, "Number Seven, 'shun! All present and correct." They're standing in the sun, impassive and erect. Young Gibson with his grin; and Morgan, tired and white; Jordan, who's out to win a D.C.M. some night: And Hughes that's keen on wiring; and Davies ('79), Who always must be firing at the ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... brightened and his cheek flushed a little as I spoke, with more of earnestness or passion than any incident, however exciting, is wont to provoke among his impassive race. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... moment, upon the scaffolding all was a tumult of uproar and confusion, shouting and gesticulation; only the King sat calm, sullen, impassive. The Earl wheeled his horse and sat for a moment or two as though to make quite sure that he knew the King's mind. The blow that had been given was foul, unknightly, but the King gave no sign either of acquiescence or rebuke; he had willed that ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... heavy face impassive. And so he remained for a long time. Well, Laura was gone—no mistake about that—and this time she was gone for good. She was going to live in Rome. Try to stop her? No. What good would it do? Wings of the Eagles, ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never inquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done; but wrote rather as beholders, than partakers of human nature; as beings looking upon good and evil, impassive and at leisure; as epicurean deities, making remarks on the actions of men, and the vicissitudes of life, without interest and without emotion. Their courtship was void of fondness, and their lamentation of sorrow. Their wish was only ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... at Wogan, but with a quite impassive countenance. He took a pinch of snuff and inhaled it delicately. Then ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... being, and it took me the best part of half an hour to extract the splinters of bone and bind up the wound, during which time I must have inflicted a good deal of pain upon the poor fellow, for the perspiration streamed down his face like rain. Yet all the time he sat motionless and impassive as a statue, never moving a muscle or ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... was lean and wizened, twisted like a vine-shoot, with long, dust-coloured hair and a melancholy, impassive face that seemed carved out of old oak. He put in an appearance at Saint-Elophe once every three or four months. He knocked at the doors of the houses and then ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... sit in the doorways, impassive in their eternal darkness, remain as calm as ever in the midst of this fresh gayety, and, not comprehending what is taking place around them, they keep every moment stopping their ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... yellow-haired, and deliberate; in civil life probably a drayman. JIM—Small, lean, sallow, grey-eyed, with a kind of quiet restlessness; in civil life probably a mechanic with leanings towards Socialism. POZZIE—A thick-set, low-browed, impassive, silent country youth, with a face the colour of the soil. JINKS—An old soldier, red, lean, wrinkled, with very blue eyes. His face is rough-hewn, almost grotesque like a gargoyle. In his eyes there is a perpetual ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... clasping hands as he whirled and saw them, were now signalling cheer and encouragement. Ten cars ahead, at the cab, Big Ben and Toomey, too, were leaning far out and eagerly watching the chase; the sergeant and his men, wondering much at the sight, but professionally impassive, strode to the end of the platform for better view, then all of a sudden began to shout and swing their caps, and before Cullin could recover from his surprise the foremost rider, tall, spare, with long, grizzled mustache and fiery eyes, threw himself from saddle and came ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... quietly and with some restraint, the faces of the men remaining impassive, their watchful glances evidencing nothing either of success or failure. Hampton played with extreme caution for some time, his eyes studying keenly the others about the table, seeking some deeper understanding ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... VIRAG: (His face impassive, laughs in a rich feminine key) Splendid! Spanish fly in his fly or mustard plaster on his dibble. (He gobbles gluttonously with turkey wattles) Bubbly jock! Bubbly jock! Where are we? Open Sesame! ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... whose life is one of routine, who has his business cares to claim his attention upon rising, visits at such an hour, loves at another, can lose his mistress and suffer no evil effects. His occupations and his thoughts are like impassive soldiers ranged in line of battle; a single shot strikes one down, his neighbors fill up the gap and the ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... sweeping with their fire the terrain in front of them broke the force of the attack while its leaders were still several hundred yards away. Between the Hospital and the corner bastion the men of the 67th and 92d awaited with impassive discipline the word of permission to begin firing. From out the mist at length emerged dense masses of men, some of whom were brandishing swords and knives, while others loaded and fired while hurrying forward. The order to fire was not given until ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... morning of the 22d. Our caravan consisted of three horses, three mules, and a donkey, in charge of two men—Dervish, an erect, black-bearded, and most impassive Mussulman, and Mustapha, who is the very picture of patience and good-nature. He was born with a smile on his face, and has never been able to change the expression. They are both masters of their art, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... her closely, longing to find a friend and protector in this curious and strange woman. Her eyes were moist and pleading—an appeal hard to resist. But Madame Cerise returned her scrutiny with a wholly impassive expression. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... of meetings at the town inn of the executors of a deceased duke. Two hopeful cubs of the clerk sprawled behind him in the desk, and the back-handers occasionally intended to reduce them to order were apt to resound against the impassive boards. During the sermon this zealous servant of the sanctuary would take up his broom and sweep out the middle alley, in order to save himself the fatigue of a weekday visit. Soon, however, the clerk and his broom followed Moses and Aaron, the fiddles and the ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... the tent and packed the horses, and shortly after eight Bill led the way deeper into the forest. The snow-swept trees, the white glades between, the long line of pack horses following in the wake of the impassive form of Bill made a picture that Virginia could never forget. And ever the snow sifted down upon them, ever heavier on the branches, ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... was held in the main council chambers of Hospital Seattle, and Dal could feel the tension the moment he stepped into the room. He looked at the long semicircular table, and studied the impassive faces of the four-star Physicians across ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... Three languorous women and the erect and motionless parlourmaid behind the door were waiting for him. He went straight to his carver's chair, and instantly the women were alert, galvanised into vigilant life. Leonora, opposite to her husband, began to pour out the tea; the impassive parlourmaid stood consummately ready to hand the cups; Ethel and Millicent took their seats along one side of the table, with an air of nonchalance which was far from sincere; a chair on ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... high-strung poets and singers departed, Mother of all the grass that weaves over their graves the glory of the field, Mother of all the manifold forms of life, deep-bosomed, patient, impassive, Silent brooder and nurse of lyrical joys and sorrows! Out of thee, yea, surely out of the fertile depth below thy breast, Issued in some strange way, thou lying motionless, voiceless, All these songs of nature, rhythmical, ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... chiefly taken up with leading her on to the point I had in view; but even through my personal preoccupation I remember being struck by the fact that, though she talked foolishly, she didn't talk like a fool. She was not stupid; she was not obtuse; one felt that her impassive surface was alive with delicate points of perception; and this fact, coupled with her crystalline frankness, flung me back on a startled revision of my impressions of her father. He came out of the test more monstrous than ever, as an ugly image reflected in clear water is made uglier ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... the disease of poverty, but there were times when she seemed to me the sharpest tooth of the gnawing canker. Surely as sorrow trails behind sin, Saturday evening brought Mrs. Hutch. The landlady did not trail. Her movements were anything but impassive. She climbed the stairs with determination and landed at the top with emphasis. Her knock on the door was clear sharp, unfaltering; it was impossible to pretend not to hear it. Her "Good-evening" announced business; her manner of taking a chair suggested the throwing-down of ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... word, but smoked in silence. I sat upon the couch waiting. His face was quite impassive, but I knew that my question was of ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... tempers, and local movements of hostility excited by some worthless competitor for power, had been combined and applied on the grand scale; and henceforward all was to be still. It was not given to these spell-bound understandings to apprehend that the spirit to be repressed might be of a nature impassive to these expedients, possibly to be confirmed by their application. Repressed! What is it that is manifesting itself in the most remarkable events in the old, and what has been called the new world, at the present time? And what are the measures of several of the ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... and bony man and I knew very well that I should fare ill in his hands. I dodged back, found the imperturbable James in my way and as I sidestepped him, too, Mr. Downes came face to face with the impassive butler in the doorway. ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... before it, indeed, Anton had found himself alone in the midst of his colleagues. The quiet Baumann still remained his friend, but the others considered him a castaway. The merchant received his resignation with icy coldness; and even in the hour of parting, his hand lay impassive as metal in Anton's grasp. Since then, our hero had undertaken several journeys to the capital and to creditors in the family's behalf, and now he was on his way to set the new estate in order, accompanied by Karl, whom he had induced to become the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... with his famous prophecy that the abolition of all dynastic and aristocratic institutions was at hand, with "the tranquil inauguration" of elective industrial governments throughout the world. So history moves doggedly on, propheten rechts, propheten links, a perfectly impassive welt-kind in the middle of them. In Copenhagen Ibsen had, after all, missed Brandes, delayed in Rome by a long and dangerous illness; and all he could do was to exchange letters with this still unseen but increasingly sympathetic and beloved young friend. To Brandes Ibsen wrote more freely than ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... any longer, the excitement was too great—and the suspense was so cruel. I tried to brace up my courage by the calmness of M. Jules while the jury was deliberating; the smile which he wore made me share his presentiment of coming release! But I was chilled to the heart when I looked at the pale, impassive countenance of M. Dupre!—And then, the sound of the bell that announced the return of the jury, and the murmur of anxiety that ran through the court—I was quite overcome!—A cold sweat suffused my cheek ...
— Pamela Giraud • Honore de Balzac
... The jet that had dived into the clouds came up out of the cloud formation with somehow an air of impassive satisfaction. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... the Ferronnerie, from the Rue Saint Thomas-du-Louvre to the Pont Neuf, from the Rue Richelieu to the Porte Saint Honore, there were more than ten thousand armed men; those who were at the front hurled defiance at the impassive sentinels of the regiment of guards posted around the Palais Royal, the gates of which were closed behind them, a precaution which made their situation precarious. Among these thousands moved, in bands numbering from one hundred to two hundred, ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... an impassive face, his grave eyes studying every line of me. I am bound to add that he made a hearty meal, and drank three cups of strong tea of my brewing. I gave him a cigar, one of a lot I had got from a Dutch ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... face impassive as a mask she met the footman's look. By her side her aunt was smiling recognition, but Anthony never saw that. Gazing upon the beauty of that face which he had once transfigured, he found it frozen. That proud red bow of a mouth, that had been his for the taking, might have been ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
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