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Inconsequent   Listen
adjective
Inconsequent  adj.  Not following from the premises; not regularly inferred; invalid; not characterized by logical method; illogical; arbitrary; inconsistent; of no consequence. "Loose and inconsequent conjectures."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Inconsequent" Quotes from Famous Books



... might be needing her as much as she needed him! Spurred on by this new reason for breaking through the impalpable wall that separated their inner lives, she resolved that she would no longer let herself be dominated by the inconsequent multiplicity of the trifling incidents ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... next to Gilbert, and Henry and Jimphy were together with their backs to the chauffeur. She did not appear to be tired nor had the sparkle of her beautiful eyes diminished. She lay against the padded back of the car and chattered in an inconsequent fashion that was oddly amusing. She did not listen to replies that were made to her questions, nor did she appear to notice that sometimes replies were not made. It seemed to Henry that she would have chattered exactly as she was ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine

... for three unhappy days in Fort Greene Place, then fled to her own house. A light, amusing letter from Berkley awaited her. It was so like him, gay, cynical, epigrammatic, and inconsequent, that it cheered her. Besides, he subscribed himself very obediently hers, but on re-examining the letter she noticed that he had made no mention of coming to pay his respects ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... axiomatic, gives a deceptive air of exactness and cogency which is apt to be mistaken for sound logic. He supports glaring paradoxes with an array of ingenious arguments, and with fatal facility and apparent precision he deduces from his unfounded premises a series of inconsequent conclusions, which he regards as authoritative and universally applicable. At times he becomes less rigid, as when (under the influence of Montesquieu) he studies the relations between the physical constitution of a nation, its territory, its customs, ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton

... "cheeky," where Sherringham is concerned at least: these, in the all-egotistical exhibition to which she is condemned, are the very elements of her figure and the very colours of her portrait. But she is mild and inconsequent for Nick Dormer (who demands of her so little); as if gravely and pityingly embracing the truth that his sacrifice, on the right side, is probably to have very little of her sort of recompense. I must have had it well before me that she was all aware of the small ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... not to get upon the subject of the war," was the note that Mrs. Pinckney, inconsequent as she generally was, made of the scene.—"But I'm forgetting why I sent for you," she said aloud. "I want you to go to town and buy Christmas presents and quantities of things to eat and drink. I was going myself, but I never can count upon a day as to being well with any certainty," with rather ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... his divination of the obligatory scene. There is always the chance that no one may miss a scene demanded by logic or psychology; but an audience knows too well when it has been bored or distressed by a superfluous, or inconsequent, or wantonly ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... up the steps by the hurrying mass of humanity that scurried like ants up and down, than for any other reason, climbed wearily up. As she sat pressed against a dirty man with a bundle, a sudden inconsequent thought struck her, and she removed her gloves in a leisurely way, took off her rings, dropped them into a roll of chamois-skin in the large bag, added to them a diamond cross and pendant from the lace at her neck and put ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon

... also be given of strange and inconsequent reasoning; but I shall only adduce the following. He reproaches the Pharisees, Luke xi. 47, 48, for building and adorning the sepulchres of the Prophets, whom their wicked fathers slew; and says to them, "Your fathers slew ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... you to leave this little book with me, Mrs. Hornby," he said, breaking in upon that lady's inconsequent babblings, "and, as I may possibly put it in evidence, it would be a wise precaution for you and Miss Gibson to sign your names—as small as possible—on the page which bears Mr. Reuben's thumb-mark. That will anticipate any suggestion that the book has been tampered ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman

... to do with us. Except of course that we're doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a kindness that had the strange property of striking him as inconsequent—so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... truth silenced the captain for the moment, but the next instant he startled us all with an utterly inconsequent question, having no reference to what he had before ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Susy were brought down, and Mrs. Penfold sat amid explanations and embraces, more feather-headed and inconsequent even than usual, but happy, because Lydia caressed her, and this handsome though pale young man on the hearthrug kissed her hand and even, at command, her still pink cheek; and it seemed there was to be a marriage—only not the marriage there should ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... what the coroner contemplated had already escaped him in the persistent and seemingly inconsequent questions to which he had subjected this witness in reference to these very matters. But the time had now come for a more direct attack, and the interest rose correspondingly high, when the coroner, lifting again to sight the scrap of paper containing the few piteous lines so often quoted, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... Floyd found on the table when he got up early next morning did not begin "I am much surprised," and it was such a motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long after he had left the village. For he asked for a parish in Sheffield, which was given him; and, sending for Archer, Jacob, and John to say good-bye, he ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... sufficiently weighed at the time, was her spirit of incorrigible independence, and a light-mindedness which, on maturer judgment, he could almost term irreligious. His conduct was based on principle, all of it; built firmly into habit and buttressed by scriptural quotations. Hers seemed to him as inconsequent as the flight of a moth. Studying it, in his solemn conscientious way, in the light of his genealogical researches, he felt that all her uncertainties were accounted for, and that the error was his—in having married too many kinds of people ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... smiled. "I should be one if I allowed it to annoy me. My little girl, I wish I could make you see how trivial, how inconsequent such things are. No human being is a 'nobody' who is faithful to the best that is in him. It doesn't make much real difference what people say of us, as long as we keep an honest heart and serve God and our fellow travelers according to our highest knowledge. Life is too ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd

... morose and absentminded; instead of giving sensible replies to John's questions about the avalanche, he would mutter and say inconsequent things. Finally ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... have an extraordinary desire to see the city from the house-top. I had never been any higher up than the third story of any house I had been in, and could not, I told her, go any higher in the house in which I was then living. Might I go up on her roof? Her eyes opened, but she was of an amiable, inconsequent disposition and let me have my way without ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... Buckingham Palace, the Crown of Charlemagne on public buildings and official documents, the grey ships of war riding in Plymouth Bay and Southampton Water with a flag at their stern that older generations of Britons had never looked on, these things seemed far away and inconsequent amid the hedgerows and woods and fallows of the East Wessex country. Horse and hound-craft, harvest, game broods, the planting and felling of timber, the rearing and selling of stock, the letting of grasslands, the care of fisheries, ...
— When William Came • Saki

... of none other just like it—she forgave him for involving her in the labours she already clearly foresaw were to be hers. How precisely like Red Pepper Burns it was to plan for a "stag" dinner in this inconsequent way! If it had been a coming operation, now, no detail of preparation would have been too insignificant to command his attention. But in the present instance unquestionably all he had done was to appear at the door of the kitchen and casually inform Cynthia that eight or nine men were coming ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond

... outcome of her expedition with Prosy. They perfectly understood each other, and it wasn't anybody else's concern; present company's, of course, excepted. Questioned as to plans for the future—inasmuch as a marriage did not seem inconsequent under the circumstances—Sally became enigmatical. The word "marriage" had not been so much as mentioned. She admitted the existence of the institution, but proposed—now and for the future—to regard it as premature. ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan

... unobserved. But the babble of voices seemed to pursue her. She stood for a moment on the steps and felt as if the people were all preparing to stream out of the drawing room after her, to surround her, and keep up the distracting buzz in her ears by their idle inconsequent talk. Their horses were prancing about the drive; their empty carriages, with cushions awry and wraps flung untidily down on the seats, or even hanging over the doors and grazing the dusty wheels, gave her a sense of disorder ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand

... would have inquired the genesis of so inconsequent a question, but Lady Alicia followed the trend of my thought, and answered at once as if my query had ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr

... arose, and his language became more and more incoherent and inconsequent. He addressed himself at one moment to the representatives of the people, who were quite overcome by astonishment; at another to the military in the courtyard, who could not hear him. Then, by an unaccountable transition, he spoke of "the thunderbolts of war!" and added, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... assented the ragged man, surprised and plainly grateful that one holding a supremely high position in the community should vouchsafe to remember a fact relating to so inconsequent an atom as himself. "But I ain't heared it fur so long I come mighty nigh furgittin' it sometimes, myself. You see, Judge Priest, when I wasn't nothin' but jest a shaver folks started in to callin' me Peep—on account of my last name bein O'Day, I reckin. They been ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... communicate with them, have pressed for 'tests' before the connections were properly made. They have complicated matters by their eager questionings, and have worried the operators until everything went wrong; and then, because the answers were incorrect, inconsequent and misleading, or persistently negative, they declared that the spirit was a deceiver, evil, or foolish, and, while having only themselves to blame, gave up the sittings in disgust, whereas, had they been less ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita

... Inconsequent as the question appeared to be, Jim felt an uncanny, creepy sensation about the roots of his hair, but his voice did not shake as he replied, "No, I have no relations either in Chili or in any other part of the world. I am ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood

... elapsed before the Earl could utter any comment on a suggestion so surprising, and at that particular moment so inconsequent. Was his daughter not weighing—with prayer, he hoped, and certainly with all her senses—the prospect of an alliance with the Duke of Marshire? How, then, could she pause in a meditation of such vital interest to make capricious remarks about ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... disease. Once, indeed, he broke all bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, hidden away among her jewels, found the damning evidence. There he stood, holding this thing, which was his life, in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her inconsequent behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and then the door opened, and behold herself. So, once more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence between them; and once more she raised ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... brambles and tufted grass leaned down from close-set hedges to brush the wheels of the carriage as it passed. Overhead, a restful sky of misty blue flecked with wisps of white cloud, while each inconsequent turn of the narrow twisting road revealed a sudden glimpse of distant purple hills, or a small friendly cottage built of cob and crowned with yellow thatch, or high-hedged fields of standing corn, deepening ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... as, precisely, in the general connection, Charlotte had more than once, from other days, noted, for his advantage, her consciousness of how, below a certain social plane, he never SAW. One kind of shopman was just like another to him—which was oddly inconsequent on the part of a mind that, where it did notice, noticed so much. He took throughout, always, the meaner sort for granted—the night of their meanness, or whatever name one might give it for him, made all his cats grey. He didn't, no doubt, want to hurt them, but ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... nor would he have looked so upset about it. But you know the fellow's way; whenever it's important for him to make himself clear he loses what little power of speech he has, becomes worse than dumb-unintelligible. He sputtered inconsequent ejaculations ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin

... thoughtful eyes revealed an arch gaiety sometimes; but this was infrequent; the sort of wisdom which looked from their pupils did not readily keep company with these lighter moods. Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly. She felt none of those ups and downs of spirit which beset so many people without cause; never—to paraphrase a recent ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... the Kali diamond. But it is deemed not inconsequent to close with the following brief (paid) item that appeared two days ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry

... say you are to be a priest," she added, which seemed to me a very foolish and inconsequent ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... hear, and seemed somewhat struck, but she was sure that she meant no harm; and she had a great deal to say for herself, so voluble and so inconsequent, that argument was breath spent in vain; and Albinia was obliged to wind up, as an ultimatum, with warning her, that till she should prove herself trustworthy, nothing interesting would be ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... brilliant shootings through of strange meteors; and in the tide of fluctuation, the things that were established or traditional upon this coast of chance were mere islands in the wash of ocean. It was amazing, it was almost frightening, the fluid, unstable quality of life; the rapid, inconsequent changes; yet it was also this very quality of transformation that most stirred ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain

... simple soldier mind there was something interesting and, well, yes, rather extraordinary, in a woman who sat on committees, who could hold her own so well in argument, and who yet remained very feminine, sometimes—so he secretly thought—quite delightfully absurd and inconsequent, with it all. ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... 'I say to him,' says Keats, 'why not the pen sometimes first?' We don't like precision; look at the word 'Methodist,' which originally was a nick-name for people of strictly disciplined life. We like something a little more gay and inconsequent. ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... to regard the son of Mme. de Sevigne as the more lovable of her two children, but she doubtless recognized in his light and inconsequent character many of the qualities of her husband which had given her so much sorrow during the brief years of her marriage. Amiable, affectionate, and not without talent, he was nevertheless the source of ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... Fouquet, and he smiled bitterly. "If I had any knowledge of mankind, if I were—instead of being a frivolous, inconsequent, and vain spirit—of a prudent and reflective spirit; if, in a word, I had, as certain persons have known how, regulated my life, you would not receive twenty thousand livres a year, but a hundred thousand, and you would not belong to the king, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... story which was supplemented each instant by the arrival of disconsolate Dyaks and the comments of the men who returned from cave and beach, his soul was filled with the sight of Iris and her father, and the happy, inconsequent demands with which each sought to ascertain and relieve the ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy

... prevailing architectural fashions of which he himself knows little and cares less. Preoccupied as he is with the building's strength, safety, economy; solving new and staggeringly difficult problems with address and daring, he has scant sympathy with such inconsequent matters as the stylistic purity of a facade, or the profile of a moulding. To the designer, on the other hand, the engineer appears in the light of a subordinate to be used for the promotion of his own ends, or an evil ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... teeth set, his lips congealed in an unmeaning grin, his eyes, which ran water against his will, fixed in mild reproach upon my beaming uncle, turning but once, I recall, to my solicitous self. With no unseemly outbreak—with but an inconsequent ahem and a flirt of his handkerchief over his lips—he returned to his composure. He would never again drink rum with my uncle, nor any other liquor, through all the years of our intimate connection; but this mattered not at all, since he had in the beginning pledged the old man's health with ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... Bill broke the silence which had fallen upon the room after the girl's unanswered question. His remark seemed irrevelant and inconsequent. ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... chamber was a long, low casement, and, drawn thither by the beauty of the night, I flung open the lattice and leaned out. I looked down upon a narrow, deeply-rutted lane, one of those winding, inconsequent byways which it seems out of all possibility can ever lead the traveler anywhere, and I was idly wondering what fool had troubled to build a tavern in such a remote, out-of-the-way spot, when my ears were ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... the girl with a fixed expression that embarrassed her and caused her to glance appealingly at Patsy. Her friend understood and came to her rescue with some inconsequent remark about poor Mumbles, who was still moaning and rubbing; his pinched nose against Patsy's chin ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne

... agility, also a little to one side, because there was nothing else to do, reflecting in a kind of inconsequent way, that after all Zikali's Great Medicine was not worth a curse. The lion landed on my side of the wall and reared itself upon its hind legs before getting to business, towering high above me but slightly to ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... de facto footing";[2] and, while pouring cold water upon him with one hand, with the other they gave him money. This mode of action was the result of a compromise, achieved at the Boulogne Conference, between France and her partners. A feeble and inconsequent way of doing things, no doubt. But to be consequent and powerful, a partnership must be bottomed on some common interest or sentiment; and such in the Greek question, as already explained, did ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... a fortnight with me at Oldmoxon house, and I wanted never to let her go. Often our talk was as irrelevant to patency as are wings. That day I had been telling her some splendid inconsequent dream of mine. It had to do with an affair of a wheelbarrow of roses, which I was tying on my trees in the garden directly ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale

... of this source of consolation than of the sympathy with which the stars were winking above her; and it was only after some sad interval of time, and on a very moist pillow, that she drifted into that quaint inconsequent country where you may meet your own pet hero strolling down the road, and commit what hair-brained oddities you like, and everybody ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... a certain name brought to my fancy a bouncing, red-armed creature; but that by a change of lease upon our street it has acquired an alien grace and beauty. Perhaps a scrawny neighbor by the name of Falstaff might remain inconsequent, but I am sure that if a lady called Messilina moved in next door and were of charming manner, a month would blur the bad suggestion of her name; which presently—if our gardens ran together—would come to sound sweetly ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks

... in imagination and controlled by so feeble a reason, receives such absolute freedom as this only at infinite peril. To a great number of these people, in the second or third generation, this freedom will mean vice, the subversion of passion to inconsequent pleasures. We have on record, in the personal history of the Roman emperors, how freedom and uncontrolled power took one representative group of men, men not entirely of one blood nor of one bias, but reinforced by the arbitrary caprice of adoption and political revolution. We have ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... the latter goes pricking up his ears, and starting all the way at every object which he never saw before.—I have as little torment of this kind as any creature alive; and yet I honestly confess, that many a thing gave me pain, and that I blush'd at many a word the first month,—which I found inconsequent and perfectly innocent ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne

... me to point out to you that you are inconsequent. If I, as a Christian, care for the weak and defenceless, I do so by the doctrine of Christ; but you, from a standpoint of a struggle-for-life existence, ought to see it in a different light: they are weak, they ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... the low archway by which the road leads out of the Hofgarten on the side of the city. For some minutes neither spoke, but Vjera could hear her companion's quickly drawn, irregular breath. His heart was beating fast and his thoughts were chasing each other through a labyrinth of dreams, inconsequent, unreasonable, but brilliant in the extreme. His head high, his shoulders thrown back, his eyes flashing, his lips tightly closed, the Count marched out with his companion into the broad square. He felt that this had been the last day ...
— A Cigarette-Maker's Romance • F. Marion Crawford

... from?" she said, impulsive and inconsequent, in a passionate whisper. "What is that land beyond the great sea from which you come? A land of lies and of evil from which nothing but misfortune ever comes to us—who are not white. Did you not at first ask me to go there with you? That is why ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad

... relish—Thorpe took somewhat less gloomy views of his position. He still walked eastward, wandering into warehouse and shipping quarters skirting the river, hitherto quite unknown to him, and pursuing in an idle, inconsequent fashion his meditations. He established in his mind the proposition that since an excess of enjoyment was impossible—since one could not derive a great block of happiness from the satisfaction of the ordinary appetites, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic

... the Moreens. If it were not for a few tangible tokens—a lock of Morgan's hair cut by his own hand, and the half-dozen letters received from him when they were disjoined—the whole episode and the figures peopling it would seem too inconsequent for anything but dreamland. Their supreme quaintness was their success—as it appeared to him for a while at the time; since he had never seen a family so brilliantly equipped for failure. Wasn't ...
— The Pupil • Henry James

... that the House received a shock which loosed another riot, but one of a kind different from that which greeted Representative Rollinson's vote on the "Breaker." The reading-clerk had sung his way through an inconsequent bill; most of the members were buried in newspapers, gossiping, idling, or smoking in the lobbies, when a loud, cracked voice was heard shrilly ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... girlish, feminine and inconsequent—had sighed for country and sunshine, had longed for a ramble in the woods, the music of the birds, the sight of the meadows sugared ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... my dear," says Sir George, if not quite as solemnly, with considerably more tenderness. Tommy's mother, catching the words and the tone, cheers up. All is not lost yet! The situation is saved. Tommy has won the day. The inconsequent Tommy of all people! Insult to herself she had endured, but to have the children disliked would have been more than she could bear; bur Tommy, apparently, is not disliked—by the old man at all events. That ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

... meteorologist what the elements of the planetary orbits are to the astronomer; but, unlike planetary perturbations, the weather makes the most reckless excursions from its averages, and obscures them by a most inconsequent and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Winterbourne, beginning to smile again. He was still more perplexed, for this inconsequent smile made nothing clear, though it seemed to prove, indeed, that she had a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offenses. "It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea," she said ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James

... tumble over and worry it; for it is made of bits of wool, which, as every sensible baby knows, were only put in to be pulled out. She resists the temptation, however, and presents the ball to Tara with a somewhat inconsequent "Tankou!" "Tankou!" returns Tara politely, and tosses the ball again. This time Evu sits down with her back to Tara, and proceeds to investigate the ball. It is perfectly fascinating. The ends are all loose and quite easily pulled out. Evu forgets all about ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... not so strong as you would have us believe them to be.' 'You do not know the topography of the country about Sedan,' was Von Moltke's true and crushing answer. 'Here is a bizarre detail which illustrates the presumptuous and inconsequent character of your people,' he went on, now thoroughly aroused. 'When the war began you supplied your officers with maps of Germany at a time when they could not study the geography of their own country for want of French maps. I tell you that ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks

... Dr. Green said testily, "and your mother is a singularly inconsequent and weak specimen of her sex. Well, Ned, and so that is all you can tell us about the way you passed that unfortunate evening. What a pity it is, to be sure, that you did not rouse up your friend Bill. His evidence would probably have cleared you at ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty

... the groupings of factors that evolve the causation of events! Those last words of the invisible ruffian seemed quite trivial and inconsequent; and yet they framed his death warrant. I did not myself realize it fully at the moment. As I closed the slide and stepped back, I was conscious only that a useful train of thought had been started. 'Put some more coke in the stove and let us ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman

... him some right and reasonable advice for the soothing of the agonies of her poor broken-winged angel? But alas! what security had she that a man capable of such priestly sevei'ity and heartlessness—her terrors made her thus inconsequent—would not himself betray the all but innocent sufferer to the vengeance of justice so called? No; she would venture no farther. Sooner would she go to George Bascombe—from whom she not only could look for no spiritual comfort, but whose theories were ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... their arrival at Mombassa; it was abrupt and awkward, making no reference to his love, or to the engagement which she had almost promised to make when he returned. He began and ended quite formally. George, apparently in the best of spirits, wrote as he always did, in a boyish, inconsequent fashion. His letter was filled with slang and gave no news. There was little to show that it was written from Mombassa, on the verge of a dangerous expedition into the interior, rather than from Oxford on the eve of a football match. But she read them over and ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham

... who coming on a message to Aegisthus pours out to the chorus her sorrow at the reported death of Orestes and her fond memories of his babyhood—-with the most homely details; and the most striking realistic touch is perhaps the broken structure and almost inconsequent utterance of the old faithful slave's speech. These two are veritable figures drawn from contemporary life; and though both appear only once, and are quite unimportant in the drama, the innovation is most significant, and especially as adopted ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Given an impulsive inconsequent girl, neglected as to her inner life by her only parent, and the following forces alive within her; to ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... in town are fond of consulting clergymen upon curious personal matters—matters upon which a lawyer or a doctor should rather be consulted. He himself had never encouraged such confidences. What did he keep curates for? His curates had saved him many a long hour of talk with inconsequent men and illogical women who had come to him with their stories. What were to him the stories of men whose wives were giving them trouble? What were to him the stories of wives who had difficulties with their housemaids or who could not keep their boys from reading pirate literature? ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore

... letter. I want to whisper low-toned, intimate talk, in keeping with this penumbra of the dusk. But it is just wishes like these which baffle all effort. They either get fulfilled of themselves, or not at all. That is why it is a simple matter to warm up to a grim battle, but not to an easy, inconsequent talk. ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore

... of all its sweetness? Possibly these early flowers are destined to produce fruit for the admiration of living things upon which the gardener bestows anything but a welcome. It may come to maturity just after the wet season, when flies and moths feast and corrupt in riot which provokes to wrath. Inconsequent feeders, they probe the fruit and flit away after a sip which does not absorb a thousandth part of its keen juices, or they use a comely specimen in which to deposit eggs, which in the course of Nature become grubs. All ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... B, to be of this dinner, as I had heard nothing but good of her; but I am now disabused on her subject: she is past her first youth, has very little instruction, is inconsequent, and subject to caution; but having evaded with one of her pretenders, her reputation has been committed by the bad faith of a friend, on whose fidelity she reposed herself; she is, therefore fallen into devotion, goes no more to spectacles, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... consider it most inconsequent of me to mention such a childishly fabled person to you as Dick Whittington, and yet strangely enough that hero of a nursery legend will have a great deal in common with both of ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton

... up the company. Another was the author of the comedietta, "A Gay Coquette," which the quartette of players had been presenting with fair success at several vaudeville houses in the city. The sixth at the table was a person inconsequent in the realm of art, but one at whose bidding ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry

... appearance visible, and I came back questioning whether I was the victim of a hallucination or just an everyday fool. To satisfy myself on this important question I looked about for the hallboy, with the intention of asking him if he had seen any such person go out, but that young and inconsequent scamp was missing from his post as usual and there was no one within sight to ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green

... job of feeding his horse, and Dot, after a few inconsequent remarks, sauntered away in the direction of the barn, "to be alone with ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... pavement just in front of a pedestrian. He quite calmly said, "I have no use for it: I do not smoke." Some readers, when they happen to see a puzzle represented on a chessboard with chess pieces, are apt to make the equally inconsequent remark, "I have no use for it: I do not play chess." This is largely a result of the common, but erroneous, notion that the ordinary chess puzzle with which we are familiar in the press (dignified, for some reason, with the name "problem") has a vital connection with the game of chess itself. But ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney

... was Henry with the perfection of Lescot's work, that he determined to continue it along the remaining three wings, that the court of the Louvre might be a cour non-pareille. The south wing was, however, only begun when his tragic death occurred, and the present inconsequent and huge fabric is the work of a whole tribe of architects, whose intermittent activities extended over the reigns of ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... a long and disjointed story, told in the inconsequent fashion of a child of seven unused to converse with her elders; and continually interrupted by the aunt, who, fretful and dying for her tea, jingled her distracting bracelets and chains, fidgeted with the Anglo-Indian odds-and-ends of her raiment, and disconcerted the child by the futile ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest

... risk of appearing inconsequent by mentioning that first which in point of time came last, we must premise that in our investigations with this Medium we early discovered the character of the writing to be twofold, and the difference between the two styles to be striking. ...
— Preliminary Report of the Commission Appointed by the University • The Seybert Commission

... was inconsequent and rambling. For a considerable time it led nowhere. Miss Ironsyde was taciturn. It occupied all her energies to conceal the fact that she was suffering a good deal of physical pain. She made no original suggestions. Churchouse, according to his ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts

... rejected; in the museums he buries our ancient eikons, where they become impervious to neglect, praise, or criticism; while the collector—a malicious atavist unless he possess accidental perceptions—merely rescues the mistakes of his forefathers, to crowd public galleries with an inconsequent lumber which a better taste has taught as ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross

... salmon tints faded from its waters and stars began to mirror themselves brokenly in its ripples. The mellow air was full of sweet, mingled eventide sounds as I walked back to the house. Aunt Lucy was knitting on the verandah. Gussie brought out cake and milk and chatted to us while we ate, in an inconsequent girlish way, or fed bits of cake to a green-eyed goblin in the likeness of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... mistaken, but the escape was not interrupted. At the curb the Blount touring-car was waiting, with two others, and for an instant Blount hesitated, half inclined to ask his father's chauffeur, to drive him down-town. On such inconsequent pivots fate, or accident, twirls the most momentous affairs of life. If Blount had taken the car he would have been driven directly to the hotel. As it was, he walked, and in passing the Temple Court Building he remembered that he had not seen his mail ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... letters to Lady Tynemouth. He had no literary gifts; in truth, he had no "culture," and he looked upon his wife's and Stafford's interest in literature and art as a game of mystery he had never learned. Inconsequent he thought it in his secret mind, but played by nice, clever, possible, "livable" people; and, therefore, not to be pooh-poohed openly or kicked out of the way. Besides, it "gave Alice something to do, and prevented her from being ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... intolerable deal of irrelevance. Which is the word, which the gesture, that, springing directly from the depths of one character, penetrates to the depths of another? What is the true cause of this hubbub of inconsequent words and contradictory actions? Nothing less remote than the true cause will serve, nothing else is firmly rooted in reality. Is that man expressing what he feels or is he paying out what he thinks he ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... was far more inconsequent, but it served to show our versatility, at any rate. I was all things by turns, and nothing long! First I was the page boy who admitted the "relations" (Kate in many guises). Then I was a relation myself—Giles, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... you will find the memorandum of dates which I have here set down for my own guidance more simply useful than those confused by record of unimportant persons and inconsequent events, which form the indices of ...
— The Pleasures of England - Lectures given in Oxford • John Ruskin

... not help laughing at the inconsequent answer; but anything was better than the noisy stillness of the last hour, and bringing a large brass warming-pan and some corn, they were soon busy ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... long, the longest I've ever spent. Sometimes she seemed to sleep, sometimes whispered to herself about her mother, her grandfather, the garden, or her cats—all sorts of inconsequent, trivial, even ludicrous memories seemed to throng her mind—never once, I think, did she speak of Zachary, but, now and then, she asked the time.... Each hour she grew visibly weaker. John Ford sat by her without moving, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... onlookers as to which of the twin belles was responsible for this change in his well-known habits. Unfortunately, no opportunity was given him for showing. Other and younger men had followed his lead into the box, and they saw him forced upon the good graces of the fascinating but inconsequent Miss Strange whose rapid fire of talk he was hardly of a temperament ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green

... of one of the happiest of forms—the only objection to my use of which was a certain extraordinary benightedness on the part of the Anglo-Saxon reader. One had noted this reader as perverse and inconsequent in respect to the absorption of "dialogue"—observed the "public for fiction" consume it, in certain connexions, on the scale and with the smack of lips that mark the consumption of bread-and-jam by a children's school-feast, consume it even at ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... Virchow's complete change in all fundamental scientific principles. For the cellular psychology which I advance is only a necessary consequence of the cellular physiology promulgated by Virchow. His present opposition to the former is either a renunciation of the latter or an untenable and inconsequent position. To explain this astonishing metapsychosis, we shall do well first to glance at the soul in general, and then give particular consideration to ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... which we intuitively feel as consistent with our highest thoughts, noblest moods, and best resolutions. This is distinguished from the merely sensuous, as represented sometimes in Berlioz, Goldmark, Gounod, and the like; and the fantastic, inconsequent, and irresponsible, as represented, for instance, ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... wood, and is covered by a shiny brown paint which may conceal a good deal of detailed carving. The work is sober and decorous, and not marred by any breach of good taste. It is in no sense remarkable, and has nothing special to connect it with Donatello. Its notoriety springs from a long and rather inconsequent story, which says that, having made his Christ in rivalry with Brunellesco, who was occupied on a similar work, Donatello was so much saddened at the superiority of the other crucifix that he exclaimed: "You make the Christ while I can only make a peasant: a te e conceduto ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... of her recent grief, laughed gayly, that Jack too might laugh. It was one of the privileges of this inconsequent nature never to retain impressions for any length of time. Singularly enough, too, the tears she had just shed only seemed to add new freshness and brilliancy to her youthful beauty, as a sudden shower upon a dove's plumage seems to ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... with each other and of all of them with the movement of history. I wanted a chance to talk out what I was thinking and to get new lights and promptings. So in our slow strolls homeward I presume that I often babbled freely of my studies in architecture and music, and my inconsequent remarks often led Mr. Lanier to speak somewhat freely, too, of his speculations and fancies. I now recall with wonder how he put me on such a footing of equality that I often quite forgot the difference in age and experience between us and almost felt him to be a companion ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... who in his heart of hearts has not been only too well aware that they are nocturnal, exclusively nocturnal. The shadows of evening bring with them visitors; prying, curious visitors; grim and ghastly visitors; grey, esoteric visitors; visitors from a world seemingly inconsequent, wholly incomprehensible. Mrs. Gordon did not believe in ghosts. She scoffed at the idea of ghosts, and, like so many would-be wits, unreasonably brave by day, and the reverse by night, had hitherto ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell

... all said who knew him, of whose large soul so many large deeds were demanded that he had no time for little and inconsequent things—indeed, scarce knew that they existed. To think, to feel, to create, to achieve—these were his absorbing tasks; and so exigent were the demands on his great intellectual resources that he seemed never to know the existence ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough

... any breath. Slowly, as if the Fates had decided not as yet to break that attenuated thread, the tingling, stinging shock passed. She found strength to read the whole article, almost intelligently, though at times her mind would wander to inconsequent things, and the beat of her own heart seemed to deaden her understanding. She remembered now everything, nearly everything, till she turned from her own door, a desperate, homeless outcast. She recalled a cab going somewhere, ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford

... at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only beautiful with a strange cold light—a light that somehow was a part of the effect, if it wasn't ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James

... less messy job than the bludgeon; and that there is in politics room for the delicate art of jiu-jitsu. Further, the Ontario mind was under the sway of that singular misconception, so common to Britishers, that a Frenchman by temperament is gay, romantic, inconsequent, with few reserves of will and perseverance. Whereas the good French mind is about the coolest, clearest, least emotional instrument of the kind that there is. The courtesy, grace, charm, literary and artistic ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... stress either the saliency or the significance of these incidents. I simply put them down, after many years, just as they return to my memory. Memory is sporadic; memory is capricious; memory is inconsequent, sometimes forgetting the large thing to record the little. And memory may again prove itself all these, and more, if I attempt to rescue from ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller

... me to withhold it—foolish and inconsequent. Yet I believe that if I had told you I should not have been here now. So, after all, ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim

... to throw him into a renewed panic. It required a tremendous effort to concentrate upon his business affairs, and it took the genius of an actor to carry him through the inconsequent details of his every-day life without betrayal. Alone, at home, upon the crowded 'Change, in deadly-dull directors' meetings, that sinister shadow overhung him. These long, leaden hours of suspense were doing what nothing else had been able to do since he took himself definitely ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... though curious and discursive, never really results in deep thinking. He is content to embroider his pattern out of the stray fancies of an imaginative nature. His best known work, the Religio Medici, is a random confession of belief and thoughts, full of the inconsequent speculations of a man with some knowledge of science but not deeply or earnestly interested about it, content rather to follow the wayward imaginations of a mind naturally gifted with a certain poetic quality, than to engage in serious intellectual ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... Denham; "but I didn't think—I don't know, though; perhaps I did think. I say, Val," he added in a strange, inconsequent way, as if rather ashamed of his recklessness, "that was ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... on her recovery from the paralyzed mood of the former day, while she had resolved not to blast utterly the happiness of her present husband by revealing the history of the departed one, she had also determined to indulge a certain odd, inconsequent, feminine sentiment of decency, to the small extent to which it could do no harm to any person. At Redrutin she emerged from the railway carriage in the black attire purchased at the shop, having during the transit ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... go and look at the room." With which inconsequent remark he strode on into the house, followed by Gregson, whose features ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle

... sick-nurses!' muttered Peter, and wondered how it was that Jane was able to do everything better than other people could; although, indeed, the bandaging showed more tenderness than skill, and there was something almost pathetically youthful and inconsequent in the manner of both ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... Domino; evidently I wasn't the only person who was going to a masquerade. Without doubt this fair demoiselle was about to join the festivities of some shop-girls' masquerade, where money and pedigree are inconsequent things, and where everybody is either a "loidy" or a "gent." Persons who went to my kind of masquerade did not rent their costumes; they laid out extravagant sums to the fashionable modiste and tailor, and had them made to order. ...
— Hearts and Masks • Harold MacGrath

... Samaritans. So these nations feared Jehovah, and served their graven images, both their children, and their children's children; as did their Fathers, so do they unto this day." 2 Kings xvii 41. Their religion is as inconsistent and inconsequent as the conduct of Nebuchadnezzar; who "answered unto Daniel, and said, of a truth it is that your God is a God of Gods, and a Lord of Lords," Dan. ch. ii. 47. And who, notwithstanding, set up an idol of gold, and commanded all peoples, nations, and languages to fall down and ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English

... to another subject in the light, inconsequent fashion she had, and presently deserted Yeager to meet the badinage of an extra sitting ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine

... so inconsequent, or so little recognized his position, as to object in his heart to hear himself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... man under the influence of rage, or fear, or indignation, or beside himself with jealousy, or with some other out of the interminable list of human passions, begin a sentence, and then swerve aside into some inconsequent parenthesis, and then again double back to his original statement, being borne with quick turns by his distress, as though by a shifting wind, now this way, now that, and playing a thousand capricious variations on his words, his thoughts, and the natural order of his discourse. ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus

... the door closed behind him and he found himself upon the bare landing, that he had dreamed and was awake again; for in truth the menage into which he had been permitted to peep seemed more the fabric of a dream than part of the new, inconsequent life he had elected to make his own. A curious halo of the ideal—of things set above the corroding touch of time or fortune—surrounded the old man forgotten of his world, and the patient wife, content ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... one can be called a criminal until he has been so adjudged by the courts. Happily a man's honor does not depend upon the inconsequent, malicious opinion of others. On the contrary blame should attach to him who condemns the accused without a hearing. No constituted power, whether that of king or judge, has yet convicted me of any culpable action. Apart from the courtesy which ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various

... with her handkerchief, and with a suspicious mist in her eyes,—"of course it really was her fault, only we mustn't let her know we think so. You see, she was driving. (I've always said women don't know how to drive; they're too inconsequent.) She wasn't paying attention to her horse, and let a rein slip. Before she could pick it up, the horse shied at a newspaper blowing along the road. Well, you know the rest. But Lois does not know that we ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... marked way. We have not seen the book at all. But the first letter in which you mentioned your Oxford student caught us in the midst of his work upon art.[181] Very vivid, very graphic, full of sensibility, but inconsequent in some of the reasoning, it seemed to me, and rather flashy than full in the metaphysics. Robert, who knows a good deal about art, to which knowledge I of course have no pretence, could agree with him only by snatches, and we, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... curious things, no doubt, and few may guess their furry, silent pathways as they go winding along their length of inconsequent development. For, softer than any mouse, the children glided swiftly into the next room where Mother slept beneath the book- shelves—two shining little radiant figures, hand in hand. They tried for ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood

... the poor pretty apathetic mother who had taken so long to die; a grey-haired Fay, timid as the present Fay, unwise, inconsequent, blind as Fay, feebly unselfish, as ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... conclusions (misjudgment) 481. Adj. intuitive, instinctive, impulsive; independent of reason, anterior to reason; gratuitous, hazarded; unconnected. unreasonable, illogical, false, unsound, invalid; unwarranted, not following; inconsequent, inconsequential; inconsistent; absonous^, absonant^; unscientific; untenable, inconclusive, incorrect; fallacious, fallible; groundless, unproved; non sequitur [Lat.], it does not follow. deceptive, sophistical, jesuitical; illusive, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... her attitude, her pathetic gestures, gave extraordinary force to an appeal which, by contrast with her extreme agitation, was almost grotesquely inconsequent. Curtis was at his wits' end to find the line of reasoning calculated to convince this beautiful creature that she might, indeed, begin enduring "for the sake of others" by expressing her determination to give the ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... that he had shown strong consciousness of a pretty girl. He was middle-aged, substantial, a family man, securely married; and Alice had with him one of those long acquaintances that never become emphasized by so much as five minutes of talk; yet for this inconsequent meeting she had enacted a little part like a fragment in a pantomime ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... reached down to the perennial, and she had kept a child's capacity to be happy in small, everyday pleasures. It was always such an easy thing to please her and so difficult for little frets to annoy her. Harry's inconsequent, thoughtless ways would have worried and tried some women to the uttermost, for he was frequently less thoughtful and less helpful than he should have been. But Lucy was slow to notice or to believe ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... just now," said Mrs. Hale, with sudden and inconsequent energy; "things have got dreadfully behind in the last week. You had better go, Kate, and make him sit down, or he'll be overdoing it. These men never know ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte

... men fell into confusion, the horses and mules plunging and trying to break away. There were now men leaning on their elbows, blood dripping from their mouths. There were cries, sounding far away, inconsequent to us still standing. The whir of many arrows came, and we could hear them chuck into the woodwork of the wagons, into the leather of saddle and harness, and now and again into something that gave out ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... you cannot go off comfortably to sleep in the other's presence. Speech was given us to make known our needs, and for imprecation, expostulation, and entreaty. This pitiful necessity we are under, upon social occasions, to say something—however inconsequent—is, I am assured, the very degradation ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... intoxication, had invested himself in the domestic's livery, and had driven off with the lady in the darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the town. What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was the devil to pay in Vienna. And yet this inconsequent libertine did the following before my own eyes. We were walking down Piccadilly together one afternoon in the hard winter of 1894. It was a black frost, agonizingly cold. A shivering wretch held out matches for sale. His ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in themselves and all quite irrelevant to each other. Science never said that there could have been no Fall. There might have been ten Falls, one on top of the other, and the thing would have been quite consistent with everything that we know from physical science. Humanity ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton

... Thirdly, when she is overcome by any pleasure or pain. Fourthly, when she doth dissemble, and covertly and falsely either doth or saith anything. Fifthly, when she doth either affect or endeavour anything to no certain end, but rashly and without due ratiocination and consideration, how consequent or inconsequent it is to the common end. For even the least things ought not to be done, without relation unto the end; and the end of the reasonable creatures is, to follow and obey him, who is the reason as it were, and the law of this great city, ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... hour there the two ladies sat in conclave about Miss Peggy's mental, moral, and physical welfare. Mrs Asplin had a book in her hand, in which from time to time she jotted down notes of a curious and inconsequent character. "Pay attention to private reading. Gas-fire in her bedroom for chilly weather. See dentist in Christmas holidays. Query: gold plate over eye-tooth? Boots to order, Beavan and Company, Oxford Street. Cod-liver oil in winter. Careless about changing shoes. Damp brings on throat. Aconite ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... impersonal standpoint. His sense of humor was constantly appealed to, and he laughed softly to himself with a feeling of amusement scarcely tinged by concern for the result of the contest when Mr. Ranger, stately and ponderous, got upon his feet. He could have told with reasonable precision the inconsequent remarks which were to come; and the interruption which they made appealed to his sense of the ludicrous as strongly as ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... focussed attention. No doubt the sense of the new silk hat came and went and came again in my emotional chaos. Then something comes out clear and sorrowful, rises out clear and sheer from among all these rather base and inconsequent things, and once again I walk before all the other mourners close behind her coffin as it is carried along the churchyard path to her grave, with the old vicar's slow voice saying regretfully and unconvincingly above me, triumphant ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... highly recommended by most critics, are the fragments "Kubla Khan" and "Christabel"; but in dealing with these the reader may do well to form his own judgment. Both fragments contain beautiful lines, but as a whole they are wandering, disjointed, inconsequent,—mere sketches, they seem, of some weird dream of mystery or terror which Coleridge is trying ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... places another complexion upon it. But it is suicidal, reckless, to allow convoys to meander about the veldt in this inconsequent ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... Cousin Amelia to turn her battery on the Squire; so she presently attacked him about his poultry and his garden and his farm, the honest gentleman's absent and inconsequent replies causing my aunt and John to regard him with silent astonishment, as one who was rapidly taking leave of his senses; whilst I who knew, or at least guessed, the cause of his extraordinary behaviour began heartily to wish ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville

... one grows, the less one wonders at the sudden, inconsequent turns which an apparently reasonable person will make in a line of conduct. Still I must say that I was not prepared for what Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson did in about a week after she had declared that her daughter should never marry Harry Liscom: capitulated ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... in one of his rare inconsequent moods, talking nonsense with provoking persistence and exercising his wits in teasing everyone who came in ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... pounced upon it with instant avidity, returning it to its owner with that air that seems to flourish in parks and public places—a compound of gallantry and hope, tempered with respect for the policeman on the beat. In a pleasant voice, he risked an inconsequent remark upon the weather—that introductory topic responsible for so much of the world's unhappiness—and stood poised for a moment, ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... of the prescribed form of good English in its present state. The present state of the English is, of course, not any one of its prior states. So first let it be remarked that it is highly probable that what may have been the best of English once may now by some be counted as a weak, inconsequent patois, or dialect. ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... nothing of him but amusement, promptly forgetting him; and asking divine great deeds of those before whom she bends the knee. Everything is judged by laws of its being; the diamond must be flawless; the ephemeral creation of fashion may be flimsy, bizarre, inconsequent. So Lucien may perhaps succeed to admiration in spite of his mistakes; he has only to profit by some happy vein or to be among good companions; but if an evil angel crosses his path, he will go to the very depths of hell. 'Tis a brilliant assemblage of good qualities embroidered upon too slight ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac

... had to say proved inconsequent enough, an irrelevant suggestion concerning the training of field-dogs for close covert work and the reasons for not breaking such dogs on quail. Then the question of cross-breeding came up, and he gave his opinion on the qualities of "droppers." ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my blundering steps, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... it went, and in truth it was a pleasant chance to hear the merry, inconsequent chatter; for, like every other class of the community, girl students have their besetting sins, and one of the most obvious of these is an air of assurance, of dogmatism, of final knowledge of life, against which there can be no appeal. Girls of nineteen and twenty will ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... no longer the gay, whilom, inconsequent man about town. The best proof of this was his utter lack of pride in the matter of dress and his carelessness in respect to his personal appearance. Once he had been the beau-ideal of the town. Nowadays he slouched about the streets with a cigarette drooping listlessly between ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon

... knows the game; whom, moreover, the gallery respects. Rastignac has quite as much intelligence as is needed at a given moment, as if a soldier should make his courage payable at ninety days' sight, with three witnesses and guarantees. He may seem captious, wrong-headed, inconsequent, vacillating, and without any fixed opinions; but let something serious turn up, some combination to scheme out, he will not scatter himself like Blondet here, who chooses these occasions to look at things from his neighbor's point of view. Rastignac concentrates himself, ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac

... I'm cropped in awkward style By some uneven barber, then you smile; You smile, if, as it haps, my gown's askew, If my shirt's ragged while my tunic's new: How, if my mind's inconsequent, rejects What late it longed for, what it loathed affects, Shifts every moment, with itself at strife, And makes a chaos of an ordered life, Builds castles up, then pulls them to the ground, Keeps changing round for square and square for round? You ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace

... go into New York to attend a dress rehearsal of his new play, but he promised to write something on the train, and have it ready. His absence left me at once to play hostess and to receive the queer, curious, and inconsequent persons who flock to the door of the successful playwright, with every wish from obtaining his autograph to an offer ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell

... was silent for a moment or two, then suddenly smiled upon him—a sunny inconsequent smile. "Guess I've got you on my side now," she said with satisfaction. "You're nice and solid, Mr. Jake Bolton. When you've been picked up from the very bottom of the sea, it's good to have someone big and ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... me of the time we came so near crossing together," he broke out, diverting the subject in his inconsequent fashion. "D'ye remember that Dr. Mead who dressed our wounds for us after our little argument? It appears that he and a Dr. Woodward fell into some professional dispute as to how a case should be treated, and Lud! nothing would satisfy them but they must get ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine



Words linked to "Inconsequent" :   inconsequence, unimportant



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