"Tentative" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... come to the stile that led into the fields, and sat there for a moment. Lucia's tentative melodies were still faintly audible, but soon they stopped, and he guessed that she was looking out of the window. She was too great to take part in the morning spying that went on round about the Green, but she ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... heavy feet stamped. The dog stood puzzled by the tumult: he had a long, square, shaggy head, the color of ripe wheat; clear, dark eyes and powerful jaw; his body was narrow, covered with straight, wiry black hair; a short tail was half raised, tentative; and his wheat colored legs were ludicrously, inappropriately, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to induce Colonel Roosevelt to embark upon an entirely new activity, and negotiations were begun (alas, too late! for it was in the autumn of 1918), which, owing to their tentative character, were never made public. Bok told Colonel Roosevelt that he wanted to invest twenty-five thousand dollars a year in American boyhood—the boyhood that he felt twenty years hence would be the manhood of America, and that ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... and discusses {43} a theory, or a tentative guess of Dr. David Murray. That scholar writes "River cairns are commonly built on piled platforms, and my doubt is whether this is not the nature of the structure in question" (Dumbuck). A river cairn is a solid pile of stonework, with, perhaps, a pole in the centre. At Dumbuck ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... New York market as affected by the European markets,—a species of brokerage, which, ostensibly and in the eyes of the world attended by great risk, was really a thing of specifically safe and certain profits, thanks to the telegraphic system, the secret of which we alone possessed. In our tentative efforts, we fixed upon flour as the best-adapted subject for our experiments, being a commodity simple to deal with, and requiring fewer complications in our arrangements than anything else. But, in my own private mind, I had resolved, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... was accomplished at first in a humdrum and tentative way. About seventy years ago children's books were very uninteresting. In the little stories manufactured for children, the good boy ended in a Coach-and-four, and the bad boy in a ride to Tyburn. The good boys must have been ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... theory. Kepler gave his fancy play in the choice of an oval, greater at one end than the other, endeavouring to satisfy some ideas about epicyclic motion, but could not find a satisfactory curve. He then had the fortunate idea of trying an ellipse with the same axis as his tentative oval. Mars now appeared too slow at the apses instead of too quick, so obviously some intermediate ellipse must be sought between the trial ellipse and the circle on the same axis. At this point the "long arm of coincidence" came into play. Half-way between the apses lay ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... than the door was opened by Maisie. He was slightly embarrassed at being brought face to face with her thus suddenly after the last scene that they had shared. He entered in a tentative manner, only just crossing the threshold, as though he had ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... the day there had crept, with the approach of evening, that heartening crispness which heralds the advent of autumn. Already, in the valley by the ninth tee, some of the trees had begun to try on strange colours, in tentative experiment against the coming of nature's annual fancy dress ball, when the soberest tree casts off its workaday suit of green and plunges into a riot of reds and yellows. On the terrace in front of the club-house an occasional withered leaf ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... but one impressive mood, and his spirit is never kindled, save in the society where none intrude; but in his own domain he is a master, and is always sure of himself and his effect. There is no tentative, undecisive brushwork, such as we often see in the subtle search for the unrevealed, which makes or mars Mr. Yeats' work. He is at home in his peculiar world, while the other is ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... dry? He surely meant him no harm, however, for flashes of kindliness had lighted the shrivelled face as he talked. His look was bent in piercing comment upon Philip, who, trying hard to solve the mystery, now made a tentative rejoinder to his strange statement. Rising from his chair and bowing, he said, with shrewd foreknowledge of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... in them no promise of stability or of fruit after their kind. Only, by the increasing number of them, they have given proof of an unrest on this subject which at last is beginning to embody itself in organization and concerted study and enterprise. A fifty years of mere tentative groping is likely to be followed by another ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... chairs, squatted, and bent his shoulders down till his hands closed on the rope. He shifted his feet slightly, tautened his muscles with a tentative pull, then relaxed again, questing for a perfect adjustment of all the levers ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... responsibility so much as thinkable? Benjamin Jowett, in his Essay on Predestination and Freewill, glanced at this problem in passing, and the remarks he made upon it more than fifty years ago, if somewhat tentative, are ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the fineness of the morning had as much to do with it as anything—I took a piece of paper and after meditating a while scribbled in the most tentative manner imaginable the first verse and chorus of that song almost as it was published. I think one or two lines were too long or didn't rhyme, but eventually either he or I hammered them into shape, but before that I rather ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... merely remark that to any one who has really appreciated the meaning of biblical criticism, it is scarcely conceivable that the evidence for miracles could seem sufficiently cogent to constitute such an attestation. In proof of that I will merely appeal to the modest, apologetic, tentative tone in which {140} scholarly and sober-minded theologians who would usually be classed among the defenders of miracles—men like the Bishop of Ely or Professor Sanday of Oxford—are content to speak of such evidences. They admit the difficulty of proving that ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... in the room, standing about and looking tentative. Lady Holme knew most of them. One was a French actor who was going to give a monologue; very short, very stout, very intelligent-looking, with a face that seemed almost too flexible to be human. Two or three ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way down town in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... herself could not have told exactly how it was done, but she knew that two minutes later young Gray and Mellicent were at the piano, he, shining-eyed and happy, drawing a tentative bow across the strings: she, no less shining-eyed and happy, giving him ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... overwhelming enough to secure his adhesion. He was therefore forced to torpedo the Conciliation Bill, to snatch away the half-loaf that was better than no bread at all. He spoke and voted against these tentative measures of feminine enfranchisement, with tongue in cheek, no doubt, and hand linked in that of Lulu Grandcourt whose opposition to any vote being given to woman and whole attitude towards the sex was so bitter that he had to be reminded by Lord Aloysius Brinsley ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... out a tentative feeler of thought toward the mind behind that expressionless face. He expected to find it difficult to do, because of long disuse of the faculty. But he was amazed both at the ease with which the technique returned to him, and ...
— Man of Many Minds • E. Everett Evans
... in West Asia were running towards exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric activities in Europe, in that ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Her first tentative efforts at going to the field were cautious and beset with difficulties. Through the long Peninsula campaign as each transport brought its load of suffering men, with the mud of the Chickahominy and the gore ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... quarters about the human stud farm. [Footnote: See Mankind in the Making, Ch. II.] State breeding of the population was a reasonable proposal for Plato to make, in view of the biological knowledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his metaphysics; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, it is preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain school of sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp the modification of meaning "species" and "individual" ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... Max roared. Miss Holzmeyer made a dash for the stairway, and before Elkan had time to formulate even a tentative plan of escape she ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... Until he had formally and avowedly assumed that position, his labours in this way were, as a matter of course, in no respect whatever systematised. They were uncertain, and in one sense, as the sequel shewed, purely tentative or preliminary. They yielded a world of delight, however, and did a world of good at the same time; while they were, unconsciously to himself, preparing the way effectually—that is, by ripening his powers and perfecting his skill through practice—for the ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... for bread as well as an art schooling. He was not even sure of a vocation. An accident determined it. He became a workman in the atelier of Carrier-Belleuse, the sculptor, but not until he had failed at the Beaux-Arts (which was a stroke of luck for his genius) and after he had enjoyed some tentative instruction under the great animal sculptor, Barye. He was never a steady pupil of Barye, nor did he long remain with him. He went to Belgium and "ghosted" for other sculptors; indeed, it was a privilege, or ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... today the representatives of the Church in the different States met to adopt a constitution. There had been tentative efforts to effect an organization and adopt a Book of Common Prayer, all of which were overruled by the good providence of God. Many not of our fold desired a liturgy. Benjamin Franklin published at his own expense a revised copy of the English liturgy. The House of ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... that general scheme. We should have as good roads between the little farms in Mississippi or in South Carolina or in Northern Minnesota as we have in Maryland or in California. There is a work—the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made a small and tentative appropriation—the work of surveying this country and seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not been mobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for these men who come back, ...
— Address by Honorable Franklin K. Lane, Secretary of the Interior at Conference of Regional Chairmen of the Highway Transport Committee Council of National Defence • US Government
... every minute brought it nearer. It would be there in fact, virtually, that night, if Mr. Wendover should begin to realise the brutality of Selina's not turning up at all. The comfort had been, hitherto, that he didn't realise brutalities. There were certain violins that emitted tentative sounds in the orchestra; they shortened the time and made her uneasier—fixed her idea that he could lift her out of her mire if he would. It didn't appear to prove that he would, his also observing Lady Ringrose's empty box without making an encouraging comment upon ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... of those who wish to try DDT for chestnut weevil control, the following tentative ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... through to the clearing, where lay the farm, right on the ridge, its fields smiling in the sun, a truce of Nature with man's energy and persistence. Yet not a final truce. For all around, the woods crept up to the open and thrust in tentative fingers—tiny pine trees, sprouts and seedlings of hardwood, scraps of underbrush—all trying to gain a foothold and even when cut and overturned by the sharp plough still clinging tenaciously to their ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... these laws of inanition, the craving of the human heart for some kind of excitement could be supplied from one source only. It might have been thought by any other than a sternly tentative philosopher, that the denial of their natural food to human feelings would have provoked a reactionary desire for it; and that the dreariness of the street would have been gilded by dreams of pastoral felicity. Experience has shown ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... of her from herself, for she responded to his tentative questions about the place in the briefest fashion. Afterwards he interviewed Mrs. Fraser cautiously, and ascertained that the girl's name was Helen Fraser, and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... wrecked framework of his own plans. He heard the echo of Fadeaway's sneering laugh in the fury of the wind. He told himself that he had been duped and that he deserved it. Lacking physical strength to carry him through to a place of tentative safety, he gave up, and credited his sudden regret to true repentance rather than to weakness. He would return to the Concho, knowing that his brother would forgive him. He wept as he thought of his attitude of the repentant and broken son returning in sorrow to atone for ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... of the Peruvian Indian—where he should live, what should be the character of his work, what should be the distinctive character of his clothing, when and whom he should marry, how much land he should hold and cultivate, and so on, were the result of ages of tentative experiment, and were so numerous and intricate that probably none but the amautas themselves thoroughly understood them. The committee, however, which had for nearly a month been preparing itself ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... hardly means more than is implied in simplicity of plot, fewness of characters and observance of the unities. He did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original treatment of a medieval theme, a tragic effect similar to that which, as he supposed, must have been produced upon an Athenian audience by a play of Sophocles,—more ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... muff which Mrs Judge bequeathed to her daughter on sailing for India, on the old diamond ring and brooch which had been handed over to her on her twenty-first birthday; she had an instinctive feeling that she rose in the man's estimation because of her air of prosperity. He made tentative efforts to arrange a further meeting. "Where do you go on Sundays, Miss Gifford? I say, we must arrange another tea like this. Lots of good tea places in town. We must sample them together. What do you say, ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... turned out. Throughout the sultry hours he held his position, not daring to move his men save to drive back tentative advances on the part of the enemy, which he knew were designed to cover the movements of their artillery. He could not press his attack home, far less penetrate to the guns, and the range of his musketry would of course be hopelessly inadequate when Chand Singh chose to begin to pound ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... sighed and turned to toil anew, The Seraph hailed them with observance due; And after some fit talk of higher things Touched tentative on mundane happenings. This they permitting, he, emboldened thus, Prolused of humankind promiscuous. And, since the large contention less avails Than instances observed, he told them tales—Tales of the shop, the bed, the court, the street, Intimate, elemental, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... which pervaded the court during this scene, in which the reader will have observed I played a bold, tentative, and happily-successful game, was broken as the witness was borne off by a loud murmur of indignation, followed by congratulatory exclamations on the fortunate termination of the suit. The defendant's counsel threw up their briefs, and a verdict ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... But whether he definitely conceived the idea of monarchy, and, looking beyond his own requirements, pictured to himself a successor at some future time inheriting the authority which he had established, no one can say. In such vast schemes there must have been much that was merely tentative. But had he lived and retained his influence we may be sure that the Empire would have been established a century earlier than ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... year after year to be distracted with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... presence of the German colony of Kiaochow on Chinese soil and the activity of German cruisers in the Yellow Sea brought the war to China's very doors. Vaguely conscious that this might spell disaster to his own ambitious plans, Yuan Shih-kai was actually in the midst of tentative negotiations with the German Legation regarding the retrocession of the Kiaochow territory when the news reached him that Japan, after some rapid negotiations with her British Ally, had filed an ultimatum on Germany, peremptorily ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale
... makes the following "tentative inductions." 1. Boys preponderate in the illegitimate lines. 2. Girls preponderate in the intermarried branches. 3. Lines of intermarriage between Jukes show a minimum of crime. 4. Pauperism preponderates in the consanguineous lines. 5. ...
— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner
... pages: pages which even to-day sound ultra-modern. And when one recalls that at the time these songs were written the score of Parsifal had been off Wagner's desk for only seven years, that Richard Strauss was putting forth such tentative things as his Don Juan and Tod und Verklaerung, that the "revolutionary" Max Reger was a boy of sixteen, and that Debussy himself was not yet thirty, one is in a position forcibly to realize the early growth and the genuineness of his independence. ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... information concerning the British-German alliance, he had begun to build, as it were, a fire behind the British Ministry, and the result was its overthrow. When the English nation began to realize that a tentative agreement was being arrived at between their country on the one hand, and Germany and Japan on the other, with America as its object of attack, there was a storm of indignation; and when the new Ministry was installed the diplomatic machinery was set to work to undo, as nearly ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... along the wall; girls shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake, the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New, the parish clerk, and John Pitcher, a neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law, lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative pourparlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was. Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being unhampered ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... of sex differentiation, hitherto more or less latent, begin conspicuously to assert themselves. Here, plainly, is the dawn of womanhood, and here, in our consideration of woman the individual, we must make a start. If we recall the tentative Mendelian analysis already referred to, we may suppose that the "factor" for womanhood begins to assert itself, at any rate in effective degree, at this period of puberty, when a girl becomes a woman; and that its most effective reign is over ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... The night of the tentative production of 'Ned's Chum' at the Globe Theatre was the brightest in my earthly calendar. Yet as I waited for my first cue an irresistible, horrible cold nausea got hold of me, and I had to fly back to my dressing-room and to endure on dry land all the agonies of mal de mer. ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... had answered his advertisement. She flitted about from limb to limb (the female may be known by the absence of the crimson spot on the back of the head), apparently full of business of her own, and now and then would drum in a shy, tentative manner. The male watched her a few moments, and, convinced perhaps that she meant business, struck up his liveliest tune, then listened for her response. As it came back timidly but promptly, he left his perch and sought a nearer acquaintance with the prudent female. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... was back in town, at least Mrs. Wesson said so in her column, where she also prophesied a program of festivities for the coming six months. This was reassuring as Mrs. Wesson was supposed to know, and anyway there were signs of it already—a first tentative outbreak of parties, little dinners cropping up here and there. People who did things were trailing back from Europe, bringing new clothes and ideas with which to abash the stay-at-homes. Big houses were opening ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... hands helplessly. "If we knew, you'd still be in L.A. Roughly six months and four days, plus or minus a month for the time differential. That's strictly tentative, according to the math boys. It's a parallel universe, one of several thousand already explored, according to the Grdznth scientists working with Charlie Karns. Most of the parallels are analogous, and we happen ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... He rounded out this beautiful word, a favorite of his father's, with a drawling, tentative inflection, which caused Anne to smile in spite of herself. Seeing which Armitage continued: "I happen to know that the steward in the galley below makes biscuits and brews coffee at this hour each morning such as are given to few mortals. If you 'll allow me the honor of playing waiter, ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... had other means at their disposal. Their country contained a treasure-house of native melody and rhythm; a region albeit which few Russians had hitherto thought it worth their while to explore. It is true that, since the middle of the Seventeenth Century, tentative excursions had been made in this direction from time to time, chiefly, though, by outsiders settled in Russia, nor had any of their efforts led to very appreciable results. The man who first turned with serious intent to the pent-up musical resources of his own country was Michael ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... good deal of pleasure with his business," was the tentative response, and Abbot knew that he was expected to ask the nature of Mr. Hollins's pleasures. He was silent, however, much to his mother's disappointment, for he had heard from other sources of the frequency with which Mr. Hollins and Miss Winthrop were seen ...
— A War-Time Wooing - A Story • Charles King
... lineage—among whom assuredly he does and will shine—but whose acute consciousness of something meretricious in his metal, made him doubt if the public would accept coinage from his mint; and so caused him to wear tentative disguises, whether he elaborated a romance or a keen and playful witticism—and who really did injustice to his own powers,—not from modesty but meanness,—even he, the son of a prime minister and heir to a peerage—a man ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... his managers and foremen. But not for a quarter of an hour after that did he get rid of his show manager, Mr. Pitts, with the tentative make-up of the catalogue for the first annual stock-sale on the ranch. By that time Mr. Bonbright was on hand with his sheaf of telegrams, and the lunch-hour was at hand ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... tentative plans have been adopted representatives of both denominations visit the local field together, confer with the churches concerned, and arrive at some agreement as to adjustments ...
— Church Cooperation in Community Life • Paul L. Vogt
... to his former hero since the meeting by the model of Jerusalem. Having inadvertently witnessed Phillotson's tentative courtship of Sue in the lane there had grown up in the younger man's mind a curious dislike to think of the elder, to meet him, to communicate in any way with him; and since Phillotson's success in obtaining at least her promise ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... urged to try for the nine, but they followed Dave's example. Then a tentative nine was formed, with Gus Plum as pitcher, and also a "scrub" nine, with one of the newcomers to Oak Hall in the box. Practice was to start on Wednesday afternoon of ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer
... another dropped in until Mrs. Willoughby was entertaining three or four in the front parlor. Miss Ainsley remained chatting with Ella, who felt that the Northern girl's remarks were largely tentative, evincing a wish to draw her out. Shrewd Ella soon began to generalize to such a degree that Miss Ainsley thought, "You are no fool," and had a growing respect for the "little baker," as she had termed ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... received two in return, and remained quiet for the night. The next morning, the 11th, they threw six more, all short, and we replied with 10, five of which fell in their trench and apparently convinced them that we intended war; at any rate they made no more tentative efforts, but in the afternoon started more or less in earnest. At 4.45 p.m. they blew up a small mine opposite "A" Company, demolished a sap-head, and half buried the solitary occupant, who escaped with bruises only; after this they bombed, or tried to bomb us, until 8-0 p.m., while we ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... was almost closed, when the soldier made an odd and, as it would seem, tentative gesture with his left hand. All the fingers were clenched, and with his extended thumb he scratched his chin slowly from ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... up a father," he said to himself aloud one day, "I'd try to find a better lookin' one. I wouldn't pa'm off on myself no such old warped stick as I be." The remark seemed a tentative one. ...
— The Desert and The Sown • Mary Hallock Foote
... no longer a mere tentative hypothesis. One by one, step by step, each division and subdivision of science has contributed its evidence, until now the case is complete and the verdict rendered. While there is still discussion as to the ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... in a rush; and to this end they published proposals in England and Barbados offering lands on liberal terms and providing for a large degree of popular self-government. A group of Barbadians promptly made a tentative settlement at the mouth of the Cape Fear River; but finding the soil exceedingly barren, they almost as promptly scattered to the four winds. Meanwhile in the more southerly region nothing was done ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... dreary circumstances of her home-coming. There was no mitigation of dreariness to be hoped for from Imogen, who was probably absorbed in her own bitter reflections. She gazed steadily out of the window, replying only with quiet monosyllables to her mother's tentative questions; her face keeping its look of endurance. One could infer from it that had she not so controlled herself she must have wept, and sitting before the mother and daughter Jack felt much awkwardness in his position. If their meeting ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... down his first tentative offer I had quite made up my mind that he wanted to engage me as a sort of super-butler with sudden death included amongst the risks of service, and I had no intention of mixing up in other people's quarrels on such terms. When I questioned him directly ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... the ships, and the Duke found himself at the head of a hundred sail. The Dutch, who were commanded by Opdam, were in no less ardent mood, and both sides were equally eager for an engagement. They soon got into touch with one another; and in June, 1665, and after some tentative attacks, a general engagement took place in Southwold Bay, off the coast of Suffolk, on the 3rd of that month. The result was a great victory for the English fleet. The Dutch lost some twenty ships, and 10,000 men in killed and prisoners. On the English ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... proper. Thus it was roofed over, and had an entrance at each side, so that the bird could go into his house at one doorway and out at the other, the room being too small to permit of his turning around in it. Thinking the nest might be occupied, in a tentative way I tossed a small club up among the branches, when to my surprise a magpie sprang out of the nest, and, making no outcry, swung around among the trees, appearing quite nervous and shy. When she saw me climbing ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... my tentative proposal," Karl said, "certain things have come to my ears which must be considered. A certain amount of unrest we all have. It is a part of the times we live in. But strange stories have reached us here, that your revolutionary party is again ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a valuable franchise to a rich corporation, by an alderman; absolution to an impenitent king, by a priest, and so forth. Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... tentative. Annie and Katie had taken full advantage of the liberty attending the illness of their mistress, and their policy with the children was one of masterly inactivity. So long as the little girls were quiet they were presumably good, ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... a lot of assurance from the conciliatory manner of the Juez, and said suddenly, in a tentative way: ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Cabinet on a hundred matters Lloyd George became impressed with the necessity of increasing the size of the British army, already millions strong. The voluntary system had hitherto been relied on, and there was strong opposition, both in the Cabinet and in the country, to tentative proposals for conscription. Lloyd George took an early opportunity of showing that he was on the side of the conscriptionists. There was an outburst of protests, but it proved of no avail, and it was largely through Lloyd George that conscription in ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... pressure at the base; oblique lines (as in certain imitation Gothic) which lose their balance for lack of a countervailing thrust against them, all these, and alas many hundreds of other possible combinations, are detestable to our feelings. And similarly we are fussed and bored by the tentative lines, the uncoordinated directions and impacts, of inferior, even if technically expert and realistically learned draughtsmen, of artists whose work may charm at first glance by some vivid likeness or poetic suggestion, but reveal with every additional day their complete insignificance as ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... was tentative. Everything depended on how well Thorpe lived up to his reputation at the outset,—how good a first impression of force and virility he would manage to convey,—for the first impression possessed the power of transmuting the present rather ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... faith that a nephew must needs be exemplary because his uncle had been a popular country squire, but she held her peace and amused herself by watching the play which went on between the two sisters during the next twenty-four hours. Esmeralda was plainly anxious and ill at ease, and made tentative allusions to the coming meet, which Bridgie received with bland obtuseness. She had not the courage to make her request in so many words, but instead brought forward a succession of gloomy prophecies calculated to dampen expectation in the mind ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... me?" cried Kate indignantly, and she laid a tentative finger against her white teeth, as if expecting ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... their intelligence displayed itself in realms to which he was almost disconcertingly a stranger. Even Madame Belot, holding a stalwart, brown-fisted baby on her arm, could comment on her husband's work with a discerning aptness of phrase which made his own appreciation seem very trite and tentative. He might be putting up with the Belots, but it was quite as likely, he perceived, that they might be putting up with him. He realized, in this world of the Belots, the significance, the laboriousness, the high level of vitality, and he realized that to ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the education of the young appears to have been a rather desultory and tentative matter; "the young idea" seems to have been allowed to "shoot" at whatever it wanted to; but in that year it was voted "that care be taken that an abell scollmaster [skullmaster!] be provided for the towen as the law directs, not visious in conversation." That was perhaps demanding too ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... them was running a slow bass scale on a sort of two-stringed horse-fiddle of a strange shape. Average Jones' still untouched glass, almost full of the precious port, trembled and sang a little tentative response. Up-up-up mounted the thrilling notes, ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... panted. He played on the boards like a public fountain. At the back of his mind there was a flickering thought that he wanted to do something, a vague feeling that he had some sort of an appointment which he must keep; but he was unable to think what it was. Meanwhile, he conducted tentative experiments with his breath. It was so long since he had last breathed that he had ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... days went by in a stupor of dull hopelessness. Thanksgiving came and the Budlong turkey might as well have been a crow. In desperation she decided to make a tentative exploration of the shops now burgeoning with Christmas splendor; every window a spasm of gewgaws. Since she had no time to make, ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... instances we select the most impressive, the power of sound, with the first rudiments of modulation! That all languages designate the melody of birds as singing (though according to Blumenbach man only sings, while birds do but whistle), demonstrates that it has been felt as, what indeed it is, a tentative and prophetic prelude of something yet to come. With this conjoin the power and the tendency to acquire articulation, and to imitate speech; conjoin the building instinct and the migratory, the monogamy of several ...
— Hints towards the formation of a more comprehensive theory of life. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to encourage Lord Warburton her own duty was to hold her tongue. It was difficult to interrogate without appearing to suggest; Pansy's supreme simplicity, an innocence even more complete than Isabel had yet judged it, gave to the most tentative enquiry something of the effect of an admonition. As she knelt there in the vague firelight, with her pretty dress dimly shining, her hands folded half in appeal and half in submission, her soft eyes, raised and fixed, full of the seriousness of the ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... stopped again. I heard it now. Out of the familiar, hollow tautophony of drumbeats there began to emerge a thread of actual melody—an untraditional rise and fall of notes—a tentative attack as it were, on the chromatic scale of the west. No he-goat's skin stretched on bamboo would ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... several minor literary museums in England, and in America the libraries of Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and Brown Universities, the Peabody Institute, and the University of Chicago. The search has enabled me to correct many inaccuracies in Miss Morgan's tentative list of prose fiction and even to supplement Mr. Esdaile's admirable "List of English Tales and Prose Romances printed before 1740," which mentions only works now ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... move, and the more so because at a very slight motion of hers there had been a motion as if in response from the man on the porch. Then there was another drawback. Some roses grew behind the hollyhocks, and her skirt was caught. She had felt a little pull at her skirt when she essayed a slight tentative motion. Therefore, in order to fly she could not merely slip away; she would have to make extra motions to disentangle her dress. She therefore remained perfectly still in the attitude of shrinking and flight. She thought that her only course until ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... well-invested capital of nine million dollars, and that Harris was the all too perfect captain of his yacht lying then in the harbour, whose worst complaint was that he had never enough work to do, Lady Weybourne's enquiries might have been considered as merely tentative. Richard shook ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... thought struck the Interviewer. "I wonder if he would examine some old coins of mine?" said he, in a modestly tentative manner. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... from the mother down," he observed, "and I'm sorry you've got into trouble with them so soon for the miller is probably the most popular man in the county." He paused, cleared his throat, and after a tentative glance at Kesiah, which fell short of her bosom, decided to leave the sentence in his mind unspoken while ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... of steps and of voices becomes distinct and draws nearer. From the mass of the four men who tightly hung up the burrow, tentative hands are put out at a venture. All at once Pepin murmurs in a ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... she reached the end of this interrupted and tentative discourse Mrs. St. John Deloraine was blushing like ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... prime importance to analyze ideational behavior so that it may be accurately described and satisfactorily defined in terms of its distinguishing characteristics. I had hoped to be able to present a tentative analysis in this report, but the results of my efforts are so unsatisfactory that I do not feel ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... Departments, they were able not only to get back the 1881 minimum of L65, but were awarded further an increased increment of L5 throughout the scale and a rise of L10 in the maximum. This was the position until December 1911, when a tentative scheme was introduced in the Money Order Department to hand over all the simpler duties to a new class of Assistant Women Clerks with an eight-hour day and a wage of 18s. rising to 34s. a week. The Association of Post Office Women Clerks, the basis of which is "equal pay and opportunities for ...
— Women Workers in Seven Professions • Edith J. Morley
... later Jim, for the fourth time, fell face downward, but now did not rise. Gates, going to him, laid his hand on his head, pushed back one of his eyelids, then knelt for a full half minute, staring straight ahead. Once he made a tentative motion toward the nearly empty water keg, once he started to raise the man's shoulders. The movements were inhibited. A brief agony cracked the mask of alkali on his countenance. Then stolidly, wearily, he arose. The wagon lurched forward. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... senseless mockery of justice, and the administration of law and equity, the merest haphazard. But for this, the common intercourse of life would be invaded by incessant doubt and suspicion, and its daily transactions, aimless and tentative. Against this condition of things man is defended by his own nature. It is more natural to tell the truth than to utter falsehood. The very persons who are the least scrupulous in this matter utter ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... a tentative way," he said, in the same mild and musing tone. "Of course, I may be mistaken. I have received many telegrams from important people asking how I stand, and I notice that the press is discussing ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... from the conscientious and able pen of Dr. Henry Malter, but of books there is none. But while this is due to several causes, chief among them perhaps being that English speaking people in general and Americans in particular are more interested in positive facts than in tentative speculations, in concrete researches than in abstract theorizing—there are ample signs that here too a change is coming, and in many spheres we are called upon to examine our foundations with a view to making our superstructure ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... Malone took a tentative step forward and managed not to fall. He stepped back again and looked at Bill scornfully. "I wasn't even in the gutter," he said. "There ...
— The Impossibles • Gordon Randall Garrett |
