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Greyness   Listen
noun
greyness  n.  A neutral achromatic color midway between while and black.
Synonyms: gray, grayness, grey.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Greyness" Quotes from Famous Books



... by the material aspect of my position to spare thoughts for its abstract quality. But, looking back from the cool greyness of later life, one sees a wistful pathos, and, too, a certain stirring fineness in the situation. And if that is so, how infinitely the pathos and the fineness are enhanced by this thought: Every day in the year, in every country in the world, some lad, somewhere, is gazing out toward ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... aimless and ill-directed lives. It has been pointed out that life is presenting an unprecedented and increasing variety of morals, menages, occupations and types, at present so mingled as to give a general effect of greyness, but containing the promise of local concentration that may presently change that greyness into kaleidoscopic effects. That image of concentrating contrasted colours will be greatly repeated in this present chapter. In ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... day between white walls, it came in whiffs and pulses, like a distant music. Half-way home, the last gold flicker vanished from a great oak upon the left; and when they came forth beyond the borders of the wood, the plain was already sunken in pearly greyness, and a great, pale moon came swinging ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... on now to a finish, but the upshot is sure to be a finish. Their anticipations of an unclouded dawn, when the present night has worn itself into the streaky greyness of morning, are certain to come to pass. The ordeal which we are undergoing is tremendous, but at any rate the nation and its allies will emerge from it rejuvenated under the spell of the present magicians, as the old ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon

... intellectual and spiritual ideas in sensuous form. He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, like that of Plato's false astronomer, becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks an appeal to sense has interest for him. How could such an one ever again endure the greyness of the ideal or spiritual world? The spiritualist is satisfied in seeing the sensuous elements escape from his conceptions; his interest grows, as the dyed garment bleaches in the keener air. But the artist steeps his thought again and again into the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... to go through some apprenticeship in the writer's art before coming upon the public as the most popular novelist of his time. Let us go back for a little to the twilight before the full sunrise, nay, to the earliest streak upon the greyness of night, to his first original published composition. Dickens himself, and in his preface to "Pickwick" too, has told us somewhat about that first paper of his; how it was "dropped stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and trembling, into a dark letter-box, in a dark office, up a dark ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... song of the river came up brokenly out of the valley. An odour of fresh grass floated about them, and the dry, cold smell of the English spring was in the air. Across the valley dim ghosts of hills lighted by evanescent gleams rose out of the east wind greyness ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... The greyness of the distant hills Is silvered in the lucid East, See, now the sheeny-plumed cock ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare

... deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the sudden vivid colour ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... moment he got into bed. He passed the mornings in a kind of torpor, endeavoring to avoid thought, to occupy his mind with the pattern of the paper, with the advertisements at the end of a book, with the curious greyness of the light that glimmered through the mist into his room, with the muffled voices that rumbled now and then from the street. He tried to make out the design that had once colored the faded carpet on the floor, and wondered ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen

... little detail of the moment that seemed to justify hope. Perhaps I had some money to spend or a holiday to look forward to; though often enough I would find nothing to save me from realising with childish intensity the greyness of the world in which it was my fate to move. I did not want to go out into life; it was dull and gruel and greasy with soot. I only wanted to stop at home in any little quiet corner out of everybody's way and think my long, heroic thoughts. But even while I mumbled my hasty breakfast ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton

... rapidly; the lights of Dover twinkled through the greyness. Micky stood and watched till they could no longer be seen. He was chilled to the bone in spite of his warm coat; he turned the collar up round his throat and thrust his ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres

... than technique. It is a difference of vision, of sensation. The strange greyness of The Professor, its stillness, is not due altogether to Charlotte's deliberate intention. It is the stillness, the greyness of imperfect hearing, of imperfect seeing. I know it has one fine piece of word-painting, ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair

... contrary, appeared much consoled, and prayed silently, and the parson mumbled so many prayers that Dick began to consider the time it would take to learn a part of equal length. And all this while the little brown box remained like a piece of lost luggage, lonely in the greyness of this station-house-looking church; and when the mutes came to claim it Kate again burst into tears. Her tears reminded the parson that he was here to console, and in soft and unctuous words he assured the weeping mother that her child had only ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... men,—as he certainly would have thought himself for a time, had she consented to put him in possession of her large income. He had therefore padded himself with more than ordinary care,—reduced but not obliterated the greyness of his locks,—looked carefully to the fitting of his trousers, and spared himself those ordinary labours of the morning which might have robbed him of any remaining spark of ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... of her own desires? Had Baroudi had enough of her and done with her? Something, that was compounded of something else as well as of vanity, seemed still to be telling her that it was not so. But to-day, in this terrible greyness, this melancholy, this chilly pallor, she could not trust ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens

... troublesome Road was thus deceived; at length the Openings among the Trees grew larger, the Air seemed thinner, it lay with less oppression upon us, and we could now and then discern tracks in it of a lighter Greyness, like the Breakings of Day, short in duration, much enlivening, and called in that Country Gleams of Amusement. Within a short while these Gleams began to appear more frequent, and then brighter and of a longer continuance; the Sighs that hitherto filled ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... an infinite distance. There came a smothered thudding like the soft sound of guns at sea; and then her voice again, and a greyness as if a swift cloud had passed ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... daughter, and his old mother is furious; and Brandon, they say, wants to cut Ronder's throat. Ronder! Mrs. Combermere paused, partly to get her breath, partly to enjoy for an instant the shining, glittering grass, dotted with figures, stretching like a carpet from the vast greyness of the Cathedral. Ronder! There was a remarkable man! Mrs. Combermere was conquered by him, in spite of herself. How, in seven short months, he had conquered everybody! What an amusing talker, what a good preacher, what ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole

... brings back to a man the gloomiest things he knows," said Lord Dunstanwolde after a few moments' silent gazing upon the scene. "I no sooner paused here to look forth at the greyness than there came back to me a hard tale I heard before I left Gloucestershire. 'Twas another ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... happened that on this morning my thoughts were tinged with a certain greyness. A chapter in my life that had been both bitter and sweet was closing, and already I saw myself once more an Ishmaelite and a wanderer ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... snatch our rifles, and with stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the jungle—until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks. You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... usual that morning. After days of rain and greyness the weather had turned over a new leaf. The sun glinted among the bottles of Unfailing Lotion in the window, and everything in the world seemed to have relaxed and become cheerful. Unfortunately, everything had included the customers. During the last few days they had taken their ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... herself for the weakness that could not check her tears. Her lonely life had been brightened by the companionship of her young lover. The youth and girlhood of which fate had cheated her had come to her with love; the future had looked rosy with promise; now it had darkened with dourness and greyness. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... do you good. There are hot scones in that dish," Pixie said quietly. The greyness of the street seemed to have entered the room—to have entered her heart. It was all grey. ... "We knew, of course, that you must like it, when you stayed ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey

... The greyness had rolled away now, and the evening grown exceptionally lovely, with clear skies overhead and great banks of pearly tinted clouds on the horizons. Where should she go? Only two ways lay open. Either she must follow Diana and Stanley up the valley, or she must stroll down to the temple alone. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... Perhaps you can realize why, and I saw for a little into the outside edge of life as lived by these women. I wonder how I can best convey to you the horror and pity of it, for we—despite the greyness of our lives—have something within ourselves to which we can turn, but they have weighed even hopes and dreams with the weights of shame, and found their poor value in pounds, shillings and pence. That is why their eyes as they pass you in the streets are so blank and expressionless. Each new day ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson

... parents, to the mother he pretended to love, to the father whose grey hairs he was by his general behaviour bringing down in sorrow to the grave—to assume without further enquiry that their eldest daughter was an imbecile? (My hair, by-the-bye, is not grey. There may be a suggestion of greyness here and there, the natural result of deep thinking. To describe it in the lump as grey is to show lack of observation. And at forty-eight—or a trifle over—one is not going down into the grave, not straight down. Robina when excited uses exaggerated language. I did not, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... stranger was of middle height, upright, and well proportioned; he was dressed in a peasant's or slave's dark tunic. His face was rather round than long; his hair black, yet with the promise of greyness, with what might be baldness in the crown, or a priest's tonsure. His short beard curled round his chin; his complexion was very clear. But the most striking point about him was his eyes; they were of a light or greyish blue, transparent, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... father's over her black dress, and went out, her nailed boots clattering on the cobble-stones. The men were up—they should have been up an hour now—but no sounds of activity came from the barns. The yard was in stillness, a little mist floating against the walls, and the pervading greyness of the morning seemed to be lit up by the huge blotches of yellow lichen that covered the slated roofs of barns and dwelling—the roofs were all new, having only for a year or two superseded the old roofs of osier thatch, but that queer golden rust ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith

... little table by her side, and the arm trembled right up to the shoulder. The sun, which looks late upon Sulaco, issuing in all the fulness of its power high up on the sky from behind the dazzling snow-edge of Higuerota, had precipitated the delicate, smooth, pearly greyness of light, in which the town lies steeped during the early hours, into sharp-cut masses of black shade and spaces of hot, blinding glare. Three long rectangles of sunshine fell through the windows of the sala; while just across ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... Wilkings waved his stick and jumped up—that's what he did; and he ninety-seven years and nine weeks! Talk about greyness! ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... and, if there aren't any, flies will come streaming in from the garden as soon as the light comes, following the scent of blood. No, not there, a little to the right, he heard her crying, and, finding a piece of linen and a hammer and some nails, he went out into the greyness still undisturbed by the ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore

... bones. The eyes gave the face its remarkable expression. The eyebrows, darker than the hair, pencilled a straight line below the wide and unwrinkled brow much whiter than the sunburnt face. The eyes, as if glowing with the light of a hidden fire, had a red glint in their greyness that gave a scrutinizing ardour to the steadiness of ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide enough for one person to slip through, and its branches met overhead. It was like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to the shadowy greyness of the avenues. I walked on and on, the branches hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy top of the chemin de ronde. I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... honour him,' Caroline guffawed, 'honour him all the more.' She had a deep voice and a deep laugh; she ought, she always said, to have been a man, but there was nothing masculine about her appearance. Her dark hair, carefully tinted where greyness threatened, was piled in many puffs above a curly fringe: on the bodice of her flounced silk frock there hung a heavy golden chain and locket; ear-rings dangled from her large ears; there were rings on her fingers, and powder and a hint of rouge ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... worm paled in his anger to a greyness ill to behold, for for three thousand years he had tried to destroy that line and still its melody was ringing ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... enough, after I had kissed him. He didn't resent Susie's manner at all. As I watched he stopped after going a few yards, and looked out at sea, beyond the entrance of the cove. Everything was disappearing in a dull greyness that was beginning to blot out the rocky cliffs, and he turned ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick

... am delighted to say that we have arrived, and see our dear Florence—the Queen of Italy, after all . . . A comfort is that Robert is considered here to be looking better than he ever was known to look—and this, notwithstanding the greyness of his beard . . . which indeed, is, in my own mind, very becoming to him, the argentine touch giving a character of elevation and thought to the whole physiognomy. This greyness was suddenly developed—let ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... declare how far they were from home, and the dancers endured their discomforts almost in silence; even the embroidered waistcoat occasionally ceased to talk about Homburg; and in all the extreme bitterness and greyness of a March morning they pulled up before the door of the ...
— Spring Days • George Moore

... fast, still he kept on. It was the time when the cornstacks would once have begun to grow indistinct, and slowly turn grey in the greyness, and homesteads one by one would have lit their innumerable lights. But evening now came down on a dreary desolation: and a cold wind arose; and the traveller heard the mournful sound of iron flapping on broken things, and knew that this was ...
— Unhappy Far-Off Things • Lord Dunsany

... approaching fog. I had seen it scores of times in that abominable low-lying part of the town, and I knew the symptoms. There was a faint smell in the air, an odour that bit the nostrils, carrying the reek of that changeless wilderness of factories and houses. The opaque grey sky lost its greyness and was struck to a lurid yellow. Banks of high fog rolled up the east and moved menacingly, almost imperceptibly, upon the town. For a moment there were dim shadows of the wharves and the riverside houses, with a church tower dimmer still behind them, and then the billows of ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... dank afternoon, early in November. The wintry sunshine, in fitful gleams, pierced the greyness of ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay

... and broad daylight. The stars go out all at once, and the inky sky which serves then becomes a delicate blue. The shadows melt deeper and deeper into the forest, clearly revealing the outlines of the straight-stemmed trees. There is just this interregnum of pearl greyness, a sort of hush-light, which lasts whilst a man counts twenty, before the silver lances of the sun are flashing through the leaves, and the grey veil which blurs the islands to shapeless blotches in a river of dull silver is burnt to nothingness, and the islands are living things of vivid green ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace

... fingering their heads, and under that heavy cupola were made the long ablutions of the faithful. But now no man comes to this old place, no murmur to God disturbs the heavy silence. And the silence, and the emptiness, and the greyness under the long arcades, all seem to make a tremulous proclamation; all seem to whisper, "I am very old, I am useless, I cumber the earth." Even the mosque of Amru, which stands also on ground that looks gone to waste, near dingy ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... stages of decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from her. What remained to tell was—attenuated. He could not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to inspire a son who seemed ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... other clearly. The doctor was tall and stooped, was untidily dressed and not good-looking. There was an unpleasantly harsh, morose, and unfriendly look about his lips, thick as a negro's, his aquiline nose, and listless, apathetic eyes. His unkempt head and sunken temples, the premature greyness of his long, narrow beard through which his chin was visible, the pale grey hue of his skin and his careless, uncouth manners—the harshness of all this was suggestive of years of poverty, of ill fortune, of weariness with life and with men. Looking ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... hours of the morning were already spent. And never shall I forget the aspect of day when it came. It was like a ghost or pale shadow of the glorious days of July with which we are usually blessed. The barometer did not go down, nor was there any rain, but an unusual greyness wrapped earth and sky. I heard people say in the streets, and I am aware that the same words came to my own lips: 'If it were not full summer, I should say it was going to snow.' We have much snow in the Haute Bourgogne, and we are well acquainted ...
— A Beleaguered City • Mrs. Oliphant

... impersonality. He stands before you, an individual whose face you can see, whose eyes you can read. He has taken unto himself the guise of a man; he has dropped the disguise of an automaton. In those eyes you may read the redness of fury or the greyness of terror; in either case it is you or him. And a soldier's job is to ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile

... first. "It would take nearly a month to refashion the book," he continues, "and I believe a month's mental labour at the present time would do me up." The weather in particular affected, him. For years he had been accustomed to sun- warmed Spain, and the gloom and greyness ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... stand it, and so frothing away his energy along the line of least resistance. But never before had he been quite so sick of life as on this particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday dinner may have had its share in his despair—and the greyness of the sky. Perhaps, too, he was beginning to realise his unendurable frustration as a business man as the consequence of his marriage. Presently bankruptcy, and after that—— Perhaps she might have reason to repent when it was too ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... hour, now flung aloft until the whole ocean to the limits of the horizon lay spread around us, anon sweeping down the back of some giant billow until it seemed that the boat was about to plunge to the ocean's bed, and the passage of every hour was marked by an increasing greyness and haggardness in the faces of my companions, while a more hopelessly despairing ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... literature and poetry of France to the highest level it had yet reached? It was preposterous, ridiculous, unthinkable, the one as great a blunder as the other. So Stephen La Mothe gilded his gold, painting his lily lover-fashion time out of mind, and whitewashed into a pleasant greyness all the ugly smirchings with which Villon had ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... without the aid of horse and hound; while even walking was made difficult by the snowdrifts that blocked the lanes, and reduced the face of Nature to one muffled and monotonous whiteness, while all the edges of the landscape were outlined vaguely against the misty greyness ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... to her tiny room in the roof that night, her head felt too full of confusing thoughts to make it possible to go to bed at once. She knelt on a box that stood in the window, fastened back the lattice, and, leaning on the sill, looked out into the night. The greyness of evening was falling over everything, but it was not nearly dark yet, so that she could see the windings of the chalky road which led down to the valley, and the church tower, and even one of the gable windows in Orchards Farm, where a light was twinkling. Generally this last object ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton

... voice the man quickly arose and, going over to the tepee, he parted the blankets and held them open. And even as she passed out the greyness of dawn was replaced by silver, and silver by pink tints which lighted up the pale green of the sage brush, the dwarf shrubs and clumps of Buffalo grass around them as well as the darker green of the pines and hemlocks of the foothills ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco

... catch for once the long stretch of the desolate Valley of Bastan, with the windings of the road reaching backward and downward along the hills. It is over while we look; the fog writhes and twists down and all is greyness again. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... before Tim turned round, and now his face was quiet, if set and determined. He walked slowly over, and stood looking at his victim for some time without speaking. The other's eyes dropped, and a greyness stole over his features. This steely calm was even more frightening than the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's face. At length the tense silence ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... fallen asleep, I slung my lantern over my arm and scampered off to the Rat Hole to yarn with the twins, making what speed I could in the fog and untimely dusk, and happy, for the moment, to be free of the brooding shadow in our house. The day was not yet fled; but the light abroad—a sullen greyness, splashed with angry red in the west, where the mist was thinning—was fading fast and fearfully. And there was an ominous stirring of wind in the east: at intervals, storm puffs came swirling over the hills from the sea; and they ran off inland like mad, leaving the air of a sudden once more stagnant. ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan

... back-street stillness; taxis hum past on their way to the West End, and engender a longing for renewed acquaintance with the normal world and the normal devil; from the ward window I can see the towers of Parliament as they stretch up through the London greyness. For an Englishman just returned from a foreign battlefield to his own capital it should be an inspiring view, that of the Home of Government, wherein the Snowdens, Outhwaites, Ponsonbys, and Sir Vested Interests, talk their hardest for the winning of the war by one side or the other, I am not sure ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... nevertheless charmed me, and held me almost with a sense of impalpable presences sharing with Joshua and me our intimate, wistful seclusion. If I was happy, in a luxuriously mournful sort of way, I knew that he was not—that he grieved persistently over something that cast a greyness over his thoughts in keeping with the atmosphere. I knew that he knew without any names whom I meant whenever ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... network of red veins. The silent battle he fought against death had left its mark. His square, jutting jaw now seemed all bone, as did his long nose and high cheekbones. They were prominent landmarks rising from the limp greyness of his skin. Only the erect bristle of his close-cropped hair was unchanged. He had the appearance of having suffered a long and ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... said Toffy, breaking off an earnest conversation with Ross, 'why there should be such an enormous difficulty about getting a boiled shirt to wear? I suppose it really does cleanse one's linen to bang it with a stone in the river, but the appearance of greyness makes one doubtful.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... semblance of a man; but its unique characteristic was its awful greyness. It had the greyness of a rain cloud, yet rather that of a column of smoke. And from the centre of the dimly defined head, two eyes—balls of living fire—glared out ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... will not enlarge upon its merits further. Mr. Swinnerton has written four or five other novels before this one, but none of them compare with it in quality. His earlier books were strongly influenced by the work of George Gissing; they have something of the same fatigued greyness of texture and little of the artistic completeness and intense vision of Nocturne. He has also made two admirable and very shrewd and thorough studies of the work and lives of Robert Louis Stevenson and George Gissing. Like these two, he has had great experience of illness. He is a young man ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton

... Kingsmead had left him, the light falling directly on his head in a way that showed up very plainly the curious halo-like effect caused by the silver greyness of the hair ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... of the coast. Most of these trees stood back a little from the margin of high tide, reluctant to see themselves in the water, for fear of the fate of Narcissus. But where that clandestine boat had glided into gloom and greyness, a fosse of Nature's digging, deeply lined with wood and thicket, offered snug harbourage ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... receded. The night began to pass. There came a faint greyness before the window. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... this pretty child, alone in the greyness and rain of the big foreign city, was like a spring flower thrown carelessly into a river to float with the stream. He felt an impulse of protection, and it went against his instincts to let her drive about Paris unprotected, while night had hardly yielded to morning. ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed the budding ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... my heavy heart up solemnly, As once Electra her sepulchral urn, And, looking in thine eyes, I over-turn The ashes at thy feet. Behold and see What a great heap of grief lay hid in me, And how the red wild sparkles dimly burn Through the ashen greyness. If thy foot in scorn Could tread them out to darkness utterly, It might be well perhaps. But if instead Thou wait beside me for the wind to blow The grey dust up, . . . those laurels on thine head, O my Beloved, ...
— Sonnets from the Portuguese • Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

... with the inward gladness of a princess when she has come into view of a desired kingdom—whether it shall endure or be destroyed and replaced by the greyness of disappointment, depends upon the prince reciprocating and making ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... made no further remark, but sat a long time, absently gazing over the low-lying sweep of country which gradually melted into a greyness ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)

... been abroad; the summer in Italy, the winter in Egypt, and had come back with our eyes full of colour, armed against the deadly greyness of England for ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross

... greyness, soldiers, sailors, gentlemen, ladies, and even fashions, such as they were, could be seen there, and news picked up, and Emlyn would fain have persuaded Steadfast that she should be the most perfect market woman, if he would only let her ride in on the donkey between ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... been asleep. As through infinite mists of greyness he looks back on the sharp hatreds and wringing desires of his life. Now a leaf seems to have been turned and a new white page spread before him, clean and unwritten on. At last things have ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos

... of an estate for a brother Gustav, with whatever determination it may be carried on, is not a labour that evokes an unflagging enthusiasm in the labourer; and Axel, however beautiful a life of duty might be to him in theory, found it, in practice, of an altogether remarkable greyness. Two-thirds of his house were shut up. In the evenings his servants stole out to court and be courted, and left the place to himself and echoes and memories. It was a house built for a large family, for troops of children, and frequent friends. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp

... hushed that it was not broken, only faintly stirred, by the knocking of a fitful wind at the casement, and the occasional collapse of the glowing embers on the hearth. The firelight flickered over the whitewashed walls, which were dimmed to a pearly greyness by the stronger light without; the sick man's face was deep in shadow under the bed canopy, but one full-veined hand showed dark upon the blue and white check of the counterpane. All life, both without and within, was dying life—waning day at the casement, failing fire on ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... her was lying on his back at the edge of the cornfield, and the greyness of his face ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry

... vividness as well as the greyness of Halifax lets one into the open secret that it is a great industrial port of Canada, and an all-the-year-round port at that, yet it is the greyness and narrowness of the streets that tells you that Halifax is also history. In the old buildings, and their straggled ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... turned down from the knoll to rejoin their comrades, the sun dipped and disappeared, and the woods fell instantly into the gravity and greyness of the early night. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and seemed gilt with a golden background. She ought to have held a palm in her hand, poor little martyr!" There is sweet wisdom in this book, wisdom that is eternal, being simple; near may not come the ugliness of positivism, nor the horror of pessimism, nor the profound greyness of Hegelism, but merely the genial love and reverence ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... pined for him, perhaps as much as I did. And I knew that he wandered to and fro at home, meeting her thoughts with his. I brought her back as soon as I could. Gabriel met us at the station; the engine shrieked, as I did in my heart. It was a strange mingling of the Heaven of my life with the sordid greyness of the world. I saw at once that there was a change; I had parted them and taught them what each was worth ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema

... earth is gone into a dust Of greyness mingled with a fume of gold, Covered with aged lichens, pale with must, And all the sky has ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... felt, as if she saw it, the intensity of the gaze of his eyes upon her; and saw, as if the place were light and her look not averted, his "marching" face and those lines radiating to his temples (horizon tracks) where the faint touch of greyness was; and suddenly had upon her senses, with an extraordinary pungency, causing them to swim, that odd, nice smell there was about him of mingled peat and soap and fresh tobacco, of tweed and ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... standing to attention on every ship. The vessels rolled heavily to the rushing silent seas, the troops with grim faces swayed in their long lines on the careening decks. There was no colour to the scene but grey. The greyness, the vast space, the haunting notes of the "Last Post" echoing along the troopdecks, the lonely body deserted on the wide sea, left a deep impression on those light-hearted adventurers. Death! And to be buried here in a lonely ocean grave! ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... clap and never had remotely dreamt of it; saw it like a tiger coming down the street to devour him; saw it like the lid of hell slowly slipping away before his eyes. Saw it! I was watching him. He saw it; and things—age, greyness, lasting and immovable calamity—I don't know what—frightful things—came down on his face like the dust of ashes settling on ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... been wont to see similar things in the "Daily News," in Chicago, but they did not hold his attention. Now, these things were like grey clouds hovering along the horizon of a clear day. They threatened to cover and obscure his life with chilly greyness. He tried to shake them off, to forget and brace up. Sometimes he said ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... short-lived. Below in the hall it was black darkness save for a greyness at the entrance of the verandah passage; but the defence was soon aware that the place was thick with men. Presently there came a scuffling from Carfrae's post towards the back stairs, and a cry as of some one choking. And at the same moment a flare was lit below which brought the whole ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... and dreary was the world yesterday. How dismal everything appeared, with not a glimpse of the blue sky. But look now at all this," and Douglas threw out his hand in an eloquent gesture. "See what a change has taken place in a short time. The greyness is gone, and look how blue is the sky, and how bright and warm the sun. Surely He who is able to effect such a marvellous change in Nature in such a few hours, will not forsake His servant in the hour of need. Cheer up, sir, and do not ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody

... to tell stories and to compose poems. No doubt the Icelanders have thus wasted on poetical fantasies and visionary daydreams much of the energy that they might otherwise have used in life's real battle. But the greyness of commonplace existence became more bearable when they listened to tales of the heroic deeds of the past. In the evening, the living-room (bastofa), built of turf and stone, became a little more cheerful, and hunger was forgotten, ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various

... estate in the factory and have been merged an indistinguishable unit in the drab mass of cloth-capped humans who, at certain hours of the day, flood the streets of Bludston, and swarm on the roofs of clanging and shrieking tramcars, and on Saturday afternoons gather in clotted greyness on the football ground. He might have been sober and industrious-the proletariat of Bludston is not entirely composed of Buttons-but he would have taken the colour of his environment, and the world outside ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... 'The workmanship of these heart-breaking little studies is, as we should expect from Mr. Gibson, honest and exact. Their grim view of human destiny, its all-pervading greyness, is presented with appropriate austerity; and this restraint and detachment increase their vividness and force.... The beautiful sonnets in the section called "Home" show that he, too, ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson

... spoke, and she felt that he eyed her the while with disapproval of her appearance, and anger at her condition. She knew the look only too well, poor soul, and her attitude was deprecating as she sat there gazing up pitifully at the strip of level greyness above the houses opposite. She said nothing, however, only rocked herself on her chair, and looked forlornly miserable; seeing which brought his irritation to a climax. He flung the book across the room; but even in the act, his countenance cleared. He was standing in the window, and ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... divisa est." Is it fanciful to say of the three parts into which all Gaul is divided that by their colours may they be known, the blue, the brown and the ghastly, ghoulish, intolerable, bestial, but, thank God, passing, grey? Yes, thank God, the blight of greyness cannot last long; even now the scabrous plague is being burnt up and swept back and overwhelmed by the resistless flood, eager yet cautious, persistent yet fiery, of the blue and the brown. Hideous, pitiable, soul-searing are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various

... short time he came back, the greyness all gone from his face, though his eyes still glittered with the dry, hard light of starvation. He went back to the chair near the door, ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... little rill, and some hares and a pheasant for company. The sun was gone down behind the black wood on the farther cliffs of Bagworthy, and the russet of the tufts and spear-beds was becoming gray, while the greyness of the sapling ash grew brown against the sky; the hollow curves of the little stream became black beneath the grasses and the fairy fans innumerable, while outside the hedge our clover was crimping its leaves in the dewfall, ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... understood things, and who would talk rationally; it seemed to her that this secret idyll, at once tender and sincere and rather dashing, was worthy of pride. She knew that many women, languishing in the greyness of an impeccable and frigid domesticity, would be capable of envying her; she remembered that, in reading the newspapers, she had sometimes timidly envied the heroines of the matrimonial court who had bought romance at the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett

... 5 Bringing the fields benediction And the hills quiet and greyness, Are my long thoughts ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... nobles swept the floors with robes of Tyrian brocade. These reminiscences will be attended by an ever-present sense of loneliness and silence in the world around; the sadness of a limitless horizon, the solemnity of an unbroken arch of heaven, the calm and greyness of evening on the lagoons, the pathos of a marble city crumbling to its ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... captain, a day or two after his daughter's return, strolled slowly down towards the harbour. It was afternoon, and the short winter day was already drawing towards a close. The shipping looked cold and desolate in the greyness, but a bustle of work prevailed on the Conqueror, which was nearly ready for sea again. The captain's gaze wandered from his old craft to the small vessels dotted about the harbour and finally dwelt admiringly on the lines of the whaler ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... dam the stream of human failure, and, on the other hand, Mr. Polly sitting on his gate, untrained, unwarned, confused, distressed, angry, seeing nothing except that he is, as it were, nettled in greyness and discomfort—with life dancing all about him; Mr. Polly with a capacity for joy and beauty at least as keen and subtle as yours ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... head into a shape like that of the chief; the young savage who makes marks on himself similar to the scars carried by the warriors of his tribe (which is probably the origin of tattooing); the Highlander who adopts the plaid worn by the head of his clan; the courtiers who affect greyness, or limp, or cover their necks, in imitation of their king; and the people who ape the courtiers; are alike acting under a kind of government connate with that of Manners, and, like it too, primarily beneficial. For notwithstanding the numberless absurdities into which this copyism ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... wished to sleep, for he wanted to think; and he thought too much, lying gazing at his window till there was a very faint suggestion of the coming day; when, leaving his bed, he drew the curtain a little on one side, to see that the stars were growing paler, and low down in the east a soft, pearly greyness in the sky just over the ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn

... and strenuous life was finished. Watch, originally jet-black without a spot, became quite grey, the greyness being most marked on the head, which ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson

... abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of grass-plots, flower-beds, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... Officer of the leading Destroyer leaned across the bridge-rails and stared round at the ring of barren islands encircling the great expanse of water into which they had passed, the naked, snow-powdered hills in the background: at the greyness and desolation of earth ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie

... for him to do. His executors would do the rest. He had no farewell-letters to write. He had no friends with whom he was on terms of valediction. There was nothing at all for him to do. He stared blankly out of the window, at the greyness and blackness of the sky. What a day! What a climate! Why did any sane person live in England? He felt ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... give. The market-gardener, when he has saved a competence, lays his worn tools before Priapus the Garden- Keeper. Heracles and Artemis receive the aged soldier's shield into their temples, that it may grow old there amid the sound of hymns and the dances of maidens.[23] Quiet peace, as of the greyness of a summer evening, is ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail

... days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... wolf-dog went with him each time. But towards the last Black Bart preferred to stay in the room, crouched in front of her and blinking at the fire, as if he knew that each time his master would return to the fire. Then, why leave the pleasant warmth for the chilly greyness ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand

... period was an old man in appearance, though by no means an old man in years, being hardly more than fifty. Why he should have withered away, as it were, into premature greyness, and loss of the muscle and energy of life, none knew; unless, indeed, his wife did know. But so it was. He had, one may say, all that a kind fortune could give him. He had a wife who was devoted to him; he had ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colours and proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... heavy a wound that Finn and the Fianna were as if they had lost their wits. And when Etain of the Fair Hair came to the bed where Osgar was lying, and saw the way he was, and that the great kinglike shape he had was gone from him, greyness and darkness came on her, and she raised pitiful cries, and she went to her bed and her heart broke in her like a nut; and she died of grief for her husband ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory

... When the first greyness began filtering into the car, they all stood up and stamped and pounded each other ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos

... ahead of her the lights of the city shone blurred through the greyness, while above the housetops Auriga was driving higher in the east. With the first touch of fresh air in her face, she felt herself inspired by an energy; which seemed a part of the wind that blew about her; and as she walked rapidly through streets which she did not notice toward ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... was low again. It was almost dying. The daylight was fading every moment. The cinders fell together with a crumbling sound, and a greyness crept into their glowing depths. The old man sitting there made no attempt to ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman

... and the donkeys took it at a canter. At the farther side were scattered rocks, black upon orange; and in the midst of them rose some broken shafts of pillars and a length of engraved wall, looking in its greyness and its solidity more like some work of Nature than of man. The fat, sleek dragoman had dismounted, and stood waiting in his petticoats and his cover-coat for the stragglers to gather ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and thrilling, as I had heard Ronny McKinnon whistle and Dan too, and the words of that tune are not to be talked about; but when I went quietly to the planting one morning there was only the little moving of birds in the greyness of the morning and the ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... off the train at Willow Springs three days before there had been a great tenseness. Now it was all gone. She looked at Melville Stoner who occasionally looked at her. There was something in his eyes, a kind of laughter—a mocking kind of laughter. His eyes were grey, of a cold greyness, like ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson

... not that of a country woman. The thin, high-bridged nose, the fallen cheeks, the shadows under eyes gloomy and retrospective—these were marks of the town; above all, perhaps, that sallow greyness of the skin ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... the club-house a cheerful fire was burning, and the Oldest Member glanced from time to time out of the window into the gathering dusk. Snow was falling lightly on the links. From where he sat, the Oldest Member had a good view of the ninth green; and presently, out of the greyness of the December evening, there appeared over the brow of the hill a golf-ball. It trickled across the green, and stopped within a yard of the hole. The Oldest Member nodded ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... building might be given for decoration without fear that its beauty would be disgraced. He is the one man alive who can cover twenty feet of wall or vaulted roof with decoration that will neither deform the grandeur nor jar the greyness of the masonry. Mural decoration in his eyes is not merely a picture let into a wall, nor is it necessarily mural decoration even if it be painted on the wall itself: it is mural decoration if it ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore

... doled out her poor dollars to him, seized the precious elixir and hurried away home to Lucy, to whom she was carrying life and strength. The little one made a weak attempt to smile at her mother, but the light flickered away and died into greyness ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... resembled a ball lying on a high little table. She looked at him temptingly and sympathetically, with an amorous smile, which the fog contorted into an insane expression. Kohn disappeared immediately in the greyness. She groaned and then ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein

... upward, into what seemed like a thin impalpable mist, but was immeasurable tracts of snow. The last cembras were left behind, immovable upon dark granite boulders on our right. We entered a formless and unbillowed sea of greyness, from which there rose dim mountain-flanks that lost themselves in air. Up, ever up, and still below us westward sank the stars. We were now 7500 feet above sea-level, and the December night was rigid with intensity ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... of the weather the wind had backed around into the east, gathering the clouds once more. The brilliancy of the morning had given place to greyness, the high slits of windows seemed dirtier than ever as the train pulled into the station at Hampton, shrouded in Gothic gloom. As she left the car Janet was aware of the presence on the platform of an unusual number of people; ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... of his fine voice. He defended himself at once from the charge of undue partiality with strong passion and deep emotion, which lie hidden beneath his deep reserve. With a face ghastly almost in its greyness, in its deepening glows and manifest passion, he repudiated the charge of unfairness; he vehemently struck his hand on the order paper which he held, and as he neared to the end of his little speech there was a ring in his ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... a sedate companion, sensible, cautious, and canny, whose flaxen hair over its roll had the dead greyness of age, though the face below was round and dimpled; "young Staneholme drew his sword last night on the President's son because he speered if he had skill ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... was rapidly coming to a stop. Larry gripped the table, struggling to hold firm to his reeling senses. This soundless, grinding halt! His swaying gaze strayed from the mirror. Outside the glowing bars he could now discern the luminous greyness separating. Swift, soundless claps of light and dark, alternating. Daylight and darkness. They had been blended, but now they were separating. The passing, retrograding days—a dozen to the second of Larry's consciousness. Then ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... to school in the morning seeing the hawthorn flowers wet, the little, rosy grains swimming in a bowl of dew. The larks quivered their song up into the new sunshine, and the country was so glad. It was a violation to plunge into the dust and greyness of the town. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... heat had moderated, and the sky was covered with a thin pearly veil of gossamer greyness which afforded a delightful relief after the glare of the past week. A smart shower had fallen during the night, and the parched earth, refreshed after its bath, appeared more fragrant and more beautiful than ever. Aunt Charlotte busied herself all the ...
— Austin and His Friends • Frederic H. Balfour

... Charolais were quick laying the table. Charolais kept up a running fire of questions as he did it; but Lupin did not trouble to answer them. He lay back, relaxed, drawing deep breaths. Already his lips had lost their greyness, and were pink; there was a suggestion of blood under the skin of his pale face. They soon had the table laid; and he walked to it on fairly steady feet. He sat down; Charolais whipped off a cover, ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson

... by the fire, watching the greyness of death quench spark after spark of living light, while a late moon sailed leisurely into view, overlaying the steely hardness of ice and snow with a veil of shimmering silver,—he took out the box, and opened it. He knew it held two pellets; ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... read this book, published in 1836, and to compare the state of society in those days with that which now exists. What changes, in half a century, have been wrought in the national character! There seems in the present a certain dulness, greyness, and indifference,—or is it rather an acquired reticence and self-control?—which contrast very strikingly with the feverish, agitated, tumultuous past, so partial to fantastic crotchets, but so sympathetic also with great doctrines and ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... A cold, damp wind blew out of the north. There was a feel of rain in the air, an ugly greyness in the road that stretched its sharply defined course through the green fields that stole timorously up to the barren forest and stopped short, as if ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... tree trunks and heavy foliage were almost tropical in character. Many of the houses are no more than one-storey bungalows; half the folks one saw were coloured; a rare Malay woman flaunted colour like a tropic bird. Avenues of pines resembled huge scrub; they cast strong shadows even in the greyness of the day. Far above the huge ramparts of Table Mountain lay the clouds, and the wind whistled mournfully from the organ pipes of the Devil's Peak. In unoccupied lands were great patches of wild arum, and suddenly I saw the gaunt Australian blue gum, which flourishes here just as ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... stand out soberly against the lighted sky, to be for twenty minutes in a wonderland of clear, fading shadows, disappearing vapours, solemn blooms of dawn, hills half glorified already with the day and still half confounded with the greyness of the western heaven—these will seem to repay you for the discomforts of that early start; but as the hour proceeds, and these enchantments vanish, you will find yourself upon the farther side in yet another ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... indeed distinguished by their hair; but I suspect that it was not the mere fact of its greyness to which she wished to draw my attention—rather it was to the manner in which they wore it, brushed up high and away from their foreheads, like dowagers of yore. Standing in a corner together very much each other's counterpart, both a trifle too dignified, they were obviously proud ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair

... the points of light, and under their steel pots the faces of the musketeers, suffused by a dull red glow, sprang for a moment out of the grey mass, to fade once more into the general greyness at ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini

... man, now completely interested in our scheme, laid all the plans in the deepest-laid way you can think. He chose a very dark night—fortunately there was one just coming on. He chose the right time of the tide for starting, and just in the greyness of the evening when the sun is gone down, and the sea somehow looks wetter than at any other time, we put on our thick undershirts, and then our thickest suits and football jerseys over everything, because we ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... stir and smell of cooking from the kitchen; but now the kitchen window was blank and still. Darkness gathered slowly about him; it obscured the black and white check, the red thread, of his suit; it flowed in about him and reduced him to the common greyness of the porch, the sod, the stream. It changed him from a man with a puzzled, seamed visage into a man with no especial, perceptible features, and then into a shadow, an inconsequential blur less important than the supports for ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... how I explained your greyness to myself? As that of a man ennuied with life—tired of living because he had nothing in the world to occupy his affections. And here I find you so far from being ennuied that you are using your whole strength to keep the guilt of murder away from another man. It's amazing. The boys will ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand

... winter had slowly thawed: the trees had uncovered their greens and browns, thrusting themselves forth from beneath the rain-washed greyness of the melting snow; the river, reluctantly at first, had cracked and swayed, and become engraved by miniature streams which ate their way, as acid on metal, across its surface. Strange messages ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... diverse in type, in expression, in all the appurtenances of manhood. Quest was dark, with no sign of greyness in his closely-trimmed black hair. His face was an epitome of forcefulness, his lips hard, his eyes brilliant. He was dressed with the utmost care. His manner was self-possessed almost to a fault. The Professor, on the other hand, though his shoulders ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... studding the moss-carpeted plains were only clumps of a willowy shrub from which hung, like grapes, clusters of white waxen blooms. The light too had changed; gone were the dancing, sparkling atoms and the silver had faded to a soft, almost ashen greyness. Ahead of us marched a rampart of coppery cliffs rising, like all these mountainous walls we had seen, into the immensities of haze. Something long drifting in my subconsciousness turned to startled realization. The speed of the shell was slackening! ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt

... building viewed from within, when the paling-gate had closed behind them. To Laura, who came from a township of one-storied brick or weatherboard houses, it seemed vast in its breadth and height, appalling in its sombre greyness. Between Godmother and Cousin Grace she walked up an asphalted path, and mounted the steps that led to a massive stone portico. The bell Godmother rang made no answering sound, but after a very few seconds the door swung back, and a slender maidservant ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson



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