"Pardonable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be pardonable if it were primitive. But that it comes long after the Vedic poets have sung reveals a continuance of stupidity which is marvellous. Doubtless those same poets were just as superstitious, but one would think that with all the great literature behind them, and the thoughts ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... to be beyond the control of the individual. They are only more lenient towards the diseases of the young—such as measles, which they think to be like sowing one's wild oats—and look over them as pardonable indiscretions if they have not been too serious, and if they are atoned ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... As you are doubtless aware, by reading the public prints, Lady Wolfer takes a great interest and a prominent part in the movement which is being made toward the amelioration of the position of woman; indeed, I may say, with pardonable pride, that she is one of the great leaders in this social revolution, which, we trust, will place woman upon the throne from which ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... you think of that, Davis?" asked Mr. McMurtrie at the end of six minutes' rapid dictation. It was his pardonable weakness to claim ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... old knight, who was peevishly blaming the lieutenant-governor, "it was my own fault; I spoke but now to Aymer de Valence with more authoritative emphasis than his newly-dubbed dignity was pleased with, and this precise style of obedience is a piece of not unnatural and very pardonable revenge. Well, we will owe him a return, Sir Philip—shall we not? This is not a night to keep ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Joseph, which was the first place they "struck" after their tramp over the desert, where most of the men died. It was there he received a mysterious message from on high telling him that bigamy would be pardonable under the circumstances. He told Johan that the Danes were some of his best subjects. Johan made his most diplomatic bow, as if he thought that this compliment to his nation ought to be acknowledged. We heard after that Brigham Young had said this ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... With pardonable pride Carter turned up the flame of the swinging lamp— which was the only lamp burning at that hour of the night—to give me a glimpse of all ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... particularly awakening, she mentally debated the serious question as to whether new bonnets, and a pair of Jouvin's gloves daily, were not sinful; but I think she decided that the new bonnets and gloves were, on the whole, a pardonable weakness, as ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... devastation?" the girl asked quietly. "Is it not pride rather than honor? The prince regent made a pardonable blunder. Do not you, my father, make an unpardonable one. The king is without blame, for you appeal to his imagination as a man who deeply wronged his father. I harbor no ill-feeling against him or his uncle, ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... excusable of all that I have written; and I wish LESS APOLOGY was less needful for these. As there is no recalling what is got abroad, the pieces here republished I have revised and corrected, and rendered them as PARDONABLE as it was ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... great writers (and there are numbers of them amongst us), he could not resist praise, and began to be limp at once, in spite of his penetrating wit. But I consider this is pardonable. They say that one of our Shakespeares positively blurted out in private conversation that "we great men can't do otherwise," and so on, and, what's more, was ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... mentioned there is, on the contrary, much to record, and we would desire to give full credit to his admirable courage and perseverance. It was with a certain national and pardonable pride that the young Italian planned his bold exploit, feeling with a sense of self-satisfaction, which he is at no pains to hide, that he aimed at winning honour for his country as well as for himself. In a letter which he wrote to his guardian, Chevalier Gherardo Compagni, he ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... father's house, Heaven, said she, and for the interposition of my dear blessed friend, suppose the mediation of my Saviour (which I humbly rely upon); and all the rest of the letter will be accounted for.' I hope (repeated she) that it is a pardonable artifice. But I am afraid ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... the brave and gentle Grace Darling; and how that handsome, grey-headed old man, her father, showed them the presents that had been sent to his daughter by Queen, and Lords, and Commons, in token of her deed of daring; and how he was garrulous about them and her, with the pardonable pride of a ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... me, what a howler—pardonable assuredly—but what a howler I had been guilty of! But why should I have doubted what Popof told me, and why should Popof have suspected what the Persians had told him regarding this Yen Lou? There was no reason for our ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... which he soon set before his colleagues. At once all appearance of unanimity vanished. To the enemy they could present a united front; in the privacy of their apartment, they were five headstrong men. They promptly fell upon Adams's draft tooth and nail. Adams described the scene with pardonable resentment. ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... Montfaucon, were tippling and playing cards at a table near the door. They looked up sullenly at my entrance, but refrained from saluting me, which, as I was plainly dressed and much stained by travel, was in some degree pardonable. By the fire, partaking of a coarse meal, was a fourth man of so singular an appearance that I must needs describe him. He was of great height and extreme leanness. His face matched his form, for it was ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... approached her ear; the Beaux told her, that a woman of her wit, was not to be confined to the dull formalities of her own sex, but had a right to assume the unreserved freedom of the male, since all things were pardonable to a lady, who knew to give laws to others, yet was not obliged to keep them herself. General Tidcomb, who seems to have been her sincerest friend, took the privilege of an old acquaintance to correct her ill taste, and the wrong turn she gave her judgment, in admitting adulation from such wretches, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... easy of access and egress; but the presence of an American steamer in the offing would have invested my enterprise with a certain publicity foreign, I think, to all our tastes. Taking advantage, therefore, of my knowledge of the peninsular coast, and the pardonable ignorance of Captain Bunker, I endeavored, through my faithful subordinates, to reach a less known port, and a coast rarely frequented by reason of its prevailing fog. Here occurred one of those dispensations of an overruling ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... grounds and extent of that redemption. The Catholic said, Christ's atonement wiped off the whole score of original sin, and thus enabled man to win heaven by moral fidelity and the help of the Church. The Lutheran said, Christ's atonement made all the sins of those who have faith, pardonable; and all may have faith. The Calvinist said, God foresaw that man would fall and incur damnation, and he decreed that a few should be snatched as brands from the burning, while the mass should be left to eternal torture; and Christ's atonement purchased ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... skate, and I guess I can do it pretty well. My father taught me—to do figures and things. I don't know any one who can skate as well as my father!" said Nan, with pardonable pride. ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... he does; judge of it by one instance only: that when we find two journals on the reverse sides of politics each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece of news for the interest of its own party, we smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one of the things that we profess to teach our young is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this piece of education will be crowned with any great success, so long as ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... narrative, but reclined in the easy-chair with his head thrown back, and an abstracted gaze wandering aimlessly about the ceiling. When she avowed her faith in the Sunday-school superintendent's loyal partisanship, which she did with a pardonable pride in having helped to make it secure, her husband even closed his eyes, and moved his head with a gesture ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... sometimes uncanny in the accuracy of its information about the enemy's disposition and plans. So that the Staff was not altogether hopeless in its effect, as the young battalion officers, with sharp tongues and a sense of injustice in their hearts, made out, with pardonable blasphemy, in ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... my cabin again," said the Princess with pardonable asperity. "You may tell Mr. Jarvis your opinion of ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... resemblance to the force and spirit which that system exerts; that war ought to be made against it in its vulnerable parts. These are my inferences. In one word, with this republic nothing independent can coexist. The errors of Louis the Sixteenth were more pardonable to prudence than any of those of the same kind into which the allied courts may fall. They have the benefit of his ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... agreeable, and perhaps pardonable, to indulge in a little self-complacency when our right to it is thoroughly established. At the present time, to be rendered memorable by a final attack on that good old market which is the (rotten) apple of the Corporation's ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... last word came out a little uncertainly, but as he strode through the kitchen garden and around to the front door, followed closely by Miss Copley, he decided with pardonable pride that he had extricated himself from an embarrassing position with his accustomed masterful dexterity. The thought comforted him, for he vaguely realized that he had come close to experiencing a nervous panic during those ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... a slight feeling of that pardonable self-importance which is natural to those who instruct others older than themselves, "that ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... its effect upon a mind set in ultimate order, so I fancied, for the few years more—nor apprehend in the least that the new element would harm what was already organized without its help. Nor have I, either, been guilty of the more pardonable folly, of treating the new feeling after the pedantic fashions and instances of the world. I have not spoken when it did not speak, because 'one' might speak, or has spoken, or should speak, and 'plead' and all that miserable work which, after all, I may well continue proud that I am not called ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... fact, that he was indebted for a reconciliation with his father-in-law, shortly after, to the kind interference of Sir William and Lady Hamilton; who, very properly representing it as solely the effect of a young man's pardonable inebriety on so joyous an occasion, again introduced him to favour at their rural villa in the vicinity of Naples. The fact, in itself, is trivial; but, on subjects of domestic or family delicacy, the minutest thread of verity may chance to have it's ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) • James Harrison
... eminently well bred, and keenly sensible of the ridiculous, he was moved to contemptuous mirth by the Puritan oddities. He had indeed some reason to dislike the rigid sect. He had, at the age when the passions are most impetuous and when levity is most pardonable, spent some months in Scotland, a King in name, but in fact a state prisoner in the hands of austere Presbyterians. Not content with requiring him to conform to their worship and to subscribe their Covenant, they had watched all his motions, and lectured him on all his youthful ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... extensive, but, as it serves in truth as an introduction to students in American schools of an author as yet little known, a less minute statement of his qualifications would hardly have been pardonable. Many quotations have been given, some from Marivaux himself, or from contemporary biographers, of so authoritative a nature as to add more weight than any summing up by the editor, and others from celebrated French critics, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... appearing on the pro-menades and in the rooms of Cheltenham, bespattered o'er with the slush and foam of the hunting field. Every situation has its decent appropriations, and one would suppose comfort would have taught these Nimrods a better lesson. It is pardonable for children to wear their Valentines on the 14th of February, or for a young ensign to strut about armed cap a pie for the first week of his appointment; but the fashion of showing off in a red jerkin, soiled smalls, mudded ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... noble magnanimity which would not allow him, even in imagination, to suffer in a less glorious manner—notwithstanding his eye is safe and as beautiful as the other, he has suffered in the wars, thought our heroine, and it is pardonable for him to use the deception, situated as he is—it is nothing more than an equivoque. But this was touching Charles on a favourite chord. Little of a hero as Julia fancied him to be, he delighted in conversing about the war with those men, who, having ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... not to spend more than five cents a month on these unwholesome temptations. She never asked the boys what they did with their money, but expected them to keep account in the little books she gave them; and, now and then, they showed the neat pages with pardonable pride, though she often laughed at the ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... Foy had not killed Marr, was a positive bit of knowledge which Pringle shared only with the murderer himself and with that murderer's accomplices, if any. So much was plain, and Pringle felt a curiosity, perhaps pardonable, as to who the ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... not mean any great sin, or great shame—God forbid; but some weak point, as we call it. Something which he had better not say or do; and yet which he is in the habit of saying and doing. I do not ask what it is. With some it may be a mere pardonable weakness; with others it may be a very serious and dangerous fault. All I ask now is, that each and every one of us should try and find it out, and feel it, and keep it in mind; that we may be ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Pharisees He denounced were men who covered rottenness with a pretence of religion; the sinners He consorted with had a saving knowledge of their vileness. Sin He knew to be human and bound up in our nature: all was pardonable save the refusal to acknowledge it and repent, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost testifying within us. If we confess our sins not only is He faithful and just to forgive them, but He promises more joy in Heaven over our repentance than ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... these females in plaster forming an advance guard to the d.c.s circle, and obstructing the view while affecting to support the upper boxes. I am told that the directors and stockholders are men of large humanity, whose only vanity lies in fancying themselves liberal patrons of art, which is pardonable in gentlemen much given to commerce. I beseech them, then, as they are christian gentlemen, to look to the distressed condition of these females, some of whom have lost their noses, others their fingers and toes, while still others have had curious antics performed with their ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... me and plenty to appal. They kept a close watch about the cottage; they had a beast of a watch-dog—at least, unless I had settled it; and if I had, I knew its bereaved master would only watch the more indefatigably for the loss. In the pardonable ostentation of love I had given all the money I could spare to Flora; I had thought it glorious that the hunted exile should come down, like Jupiter, in a shower of gold, and pour thousands in the lap of the beloved. Then I had in an hour of arrant folly buried what ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her, Miss Taber; you can see that Cynthia is properly looked after, and you can give Miss Walden the joy of her life in thinking that she is able to help you. It is a pardonable bit of deceit, but will you ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... that my divine Impulse did not lead me to adopt a course of action, but only to avoid a course—the fact which I developed in my letter to you. And then came the resolve, tardy and weak at first, but gaining ground, warning me that perhaps it was an inglorious flight; though I knew it was pardonable, I felt as if God might meet me with 'Not wrong, but if you are really bent on the highest, you must do better than this.' It might, I felt, be losing a great opportunity—the opportunity of facing a hopeless situation, a ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... these stories (and they are but samples of many) does the feather dress occur; yet it has left reminiscences which are unmistakable. The variants hitherto cited have all betrayed these reminiscences as articles of clothing, or conveyance, or in the pardonable mistake of the Bantik forefather at the time of capture. I shall refer presently to cases whence the plumage has faded entirely out of the story—and that in spite of its picturesqueness—without leaving a trace. But let me first call ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... recovering a standard at the battle of Cressy. He was afterwards beheaded at Chester as a supporter of Richard II. Another ancestor, Sir Piers Legh, fell fighting at the battle of Agincourt. We do not know what manner of men the Leghs of Lyme of the present generation are, but certainly pride is pardonable in a family with an ancestry which took part in deeds not only recorded by history, ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... happening as it does at a time when his own relations with the hazards and plots of Wall Street have grown the talk of our entire country, teem with a suggestion that should be patent to thousands. If gnats are strained at and camels are swallowed, there is certainly a pardonable satire in congratulating those who devour the latter on their noteworthy powers of digestion. As an immoral institution the Louisiana Lottery, evil as it is, cannot be compared with Monte Carlo, which arrays itself in facile splendors of enticement and smiles in mirrors and gildings ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... was not a piece of paper in that room when you carried that girl in," said the farmer's wife. "I had just swept," and she tossed her head in pardonable ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... these so arduous steps that lead to honors, and always asking him with naivete when he would be Constable, and when they should marry, as if she were asking him when he would come to the Caroussel, or whether the weather was fine. Hitherto, he had smiled at these questions and this ignorance, pardonable at eighteen, in a girl born to a throne and accustomed to a grandeur natural to her, which she found around her on her entrance into life; but now he made more serious reflections upon this character. And ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... warranted; a mistake to which scientific men appear to be more liable than others, the universe they work in being so large, and their universality (in Bacon's sense of the word) being often so small. But the delusion was not only pardonable, but desirable, in a man so zealous in the performance of his duties, and so much of a human being to all about him, as Bonnycastle was. It was delightful one day to hear him speak with complacency ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... in the heart of the strange country to which he had penetrated, Raleigh became in many ways the victim of his ignorance and his pardonable credulity. Not only was he gulled with diamonds and sapphires that were really rock-crystals, but he was made to believe that there existed west of the Orinoco a tribe of Indians whose eyes were in their shoulders, and their mouths in the middle of their breasts. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... sure you're not the man," he said, nodding his head until his elf-locks danced around his face. "Of course you're not the man. I know it—ho, ho! you can wager that I know it! A little ruse of mine, Captain Plum. Pardonable—excusable, eh? I wanted to know if you were a liar. I wanted to see if ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... pomade Andy had made, and two little pink and white mats Melinda had crocheted, the room was very presentable. Great, womanish Andy was sure Ethelyn would be pleased, and rubbed his hands jubilantly over the result of his labors, while Melinda was certainly pardonable for feeling that in return for what she had done for Richard's wife she might venture to suggest that the huge box, marked piano, which for ten days had been standing on the front piazza, be opened and the piano set up, so that she could try its tone. This box ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... to bed that night, he entered the proceeds of this day's work in his book, and then with pardonable pride, he congratulated himself on the sum total of the ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... has the highest charm of gentlemanly conversation. And it was natural to him,—his early works ("The Great Hoggarty Diamond," for example) being as perfect, as low in tone, as the latest. He was in all respects the most finished example we have of what is called a man of the world. In the pardonable eulogies which were uttered in the fresh grief at his loss there was a tendency to set him too high. He was even ranked above Fielding,—a position which no one would have been so eager in disclaiming as himself. No, let us leave the old fames on their pedestals. Fielding is the greatest ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... literary sentimentality? You might easily fancy that you cared for Mary Anerton when you were really in love with Silvia— the heart is such a hypocrite! Or you might be more calculating than I had supposed. Perhaps it was you who had been flattering my vanity in the hope (the pardonable hope!) of turning me, after a decent interval, into a pretty little essay with ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... to be the most deplorable fate that can overtake the English, and they hurry us into the great kitchen to a round table, loaded with cake and bread-and-butter and enormous bowls of tea. The angelic beings in white veils wait on us. We are hungry and we think (a pardonable error) that this meal is hospital supper; after which some work will surely be found for us ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... at me with pardonable vanity and triumph, and I bestowed upon the successful students a few comfits which I had purchased on my road for my numerous and comfit-loving friends. The mere sight of this sweet "reward of merit" immediately inspired the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Author, Herr Teufelsdroeckh has one scarcely pardonable fault, doubtless his worst: an almost total want of arrangement. In this remarkable Volume, it is true, his adherence to the mere course of Time produces, through the Narrative portions, a certain show of outward method; but of true logical method and sequence there ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... she lost her heart at once to the 'Comte d'Espoir' (his travelling title), but the Prince behaved like Scipio, not to mention a patriarch famous for his continence. 'I am no stoic,' said His Royal Highness to La Luze, 'but I have always been taught that pleasures, how pardonable soever in themselves, become highly criminal when indulged to the prejudice of another,' adding many other noble ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... are kept going by the offerings of their followers. They are mostly Shias. It is not necessary to believe that they are all descended from the Prophet's son-in-law, Ali. A native proverb with pardonable exaggeration says: "The first year I was a weaver (Julaha), the next year a Shekh. This year, if prices rise, I ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... society, French, Norse, Celtic, and Achaean. "We never hear anything bad" of Diomede, Odysseus, or Aias, and the evil in Achilles's resentment up to a certain point is legal, and not beyond what the poet thinks natural and pardonable in his circumstances. ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return. The latter part of that episode ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... came alongside our steamer to convey us to the town. Off we went in a high state of pardonable excitement. All past discomfort was forgotten; we were about to set our feet on that terra incognita to most Europeans, viz., 'Iceland,' whose high mountain masses, varying in altitude from 3000 to 6800 ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... pernicious consequence: It looks like a sort of compounding between virtue and vice, as if a woman were allowed to be vicious, provided she be not a profligate; as if there were a certain point, where gallantry ends, and infamy begins, or that a hundred criminal amours were not as pardonable as half ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... prove a very hard one at first, very discouraging, very taxing on untoughened moral sinews, he might in some weak moment want to retreat. Not likely, of course, but possibly that might happen. And so on the whole it might be pardonable caution to burn his bridges behind him. Oh, without doubt. He must not stop with advertising for the owner of that money, but must put it where he could not borrow from it himself, meantime, under stress of circumstances. So he went down town, and put in his advertisement, then ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... walked the deck that evening chatting gaily with Woodford and Sanderson I felt, it must be confessed, intensely proud of my position. And was not the feeling pardonable? There was I, a lad who had still to see his eighteenth birthday, intrusted with the absolute command of a vessel so powerful and with so numerous a crew that many a poor hard- working third lieutenant would have looked upon it as promotion had he been placed in my ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... faculty of humorous observation. Those ingenious letters to his uncle (they usually included a little hint about money) were, in fact, a trifle too literary both in substance and in form; we could even now, looking at them with a pardonable curiosity, have spared a little of their formal antithesis for some more precise information about the writer ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... willing to appear Medlers or Busy-Bodies this Way; or visibly to hurt their worldly Interests, or to seem fond of either Ridicule or Reputation by bustling about it; and, as I was quite indifferent to those Fears, I hop'd what I did, and the Motives I went on, might be pardonable if not approveable; and whatever was the Event, I as sincerely despised any Abuse I met with, as I did any Credit, that a few solitary thinking Men might ...
— A Dialogue Between Dean Swift and Tho. Prior, Esq. • Anonymous
... length found himself safe beyond the limits of his native land. His wife, whose torturing suspense may be imagined the while, concealed the stratagem as long as it was possible to impose on the jailer with the pardonable and praiseworthy fiction of her husband's illness and confinement to his bed. The government, outrageous at the result of the affair, at first proposed to hold this interesting prisoner in place of the prey they had lost, and to ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... to remark that Miss Aikin has committed the error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was singularly exact and profound. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... sentence is a faint hint at an amusing and pardonable little vanity of Webster's, who, as the reader will discover later, liked to think that he had a hand in pretty much every important measure in the political and literary history of the country in those early days, ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... chickens before they are hatched is a pardonable failing with nations carrying on war with the feeling that their all is at stake. When sorrow is a guest of every household, when monetary losses cause depression, and the cry arises time after time, "What will be the outcome of all this?" then only the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... with pardonable indignation at the affront which the misguided nobleman had put upon her; and afterward, with a ferocity the more astounding in an individual whose demeanor was by ordinary of an aspect so amiable and so engaging, she said, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... am I taking up time? We are all sinners, O my God! and Thou knowest our hearts! What we know of our errors is, perhaps, in Thy sight, the most pardonable; and we all allow that by innocence we have no claim to salvation. There remains, therefore, only one resource, which is penitence. After our shipwreck, say the saints, it is the timely plank which alone can conduct us into port; there is no other means of salvation for us. Be ye whom ye may, prince ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... terrible revolution. And then the sentimentalist proved himself a man. He confronted raving Paris, and subdued it. The old noble French blood in his veins rose to the greatness of the crisis. With a pardonable thrill of pride in a position so strange to a writer and a man of thought, into which, without any action of his own, he found himself forced, he describes how he faced the tumultuous mob of Paris for seventy hours almost without repose, without sleep, without food, when there was no other man ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... head of the island to run by. As to the Sergeant's "closeness," we have heard it whispered that he once went up to the right of the "Old Hen,"—[Glasscock's Island and the "Old Hen" were phenomenally safe places.]—but this is probably a pardonable little exaggeration, prompted by the love and admiration in which he is held by various ancient dames of his acquaintance (for albeit the Sergeant may have already numbered the allotted years of man, still his form is erect, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... early death of his parent was an irreparable loss to the son, as it was the cause of his not returning to school, where he had already shown that he possessed a vigour of intellect much beyond his years. His two elder brothers were in the army, and the pardonable fondness of his mother induced her to retain at home the only one of her sons, who could in some measure replace the ...
— The Life and Correspondence of Sir Isaac Brock • Ferdinand Brock Tupper
... the gangplank. Appropriately the arrival was on the birthday of the "revered Lincoln," and never was the young and martyred idealist of Massachusetts filled with greater pride than swelled in Colonel Hayward as he talked of his men the best regiment, he said, with pardonable emphasis, 'of all engaged ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... which he was not at all times able to conceal, made his self-command in bringing himself to it the more worthy of her esteem. He had the defects of his qualities and the prejudices of his class and profession; but over and above these pardonable failings he had ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... your position! Are you not ashamed to fall into errors which would scarcely be pardonable in a seminarist? Ah! you want the dots on the i's, well I am going ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... would reflect no credit on the most curious hamlet in tide-water Virginia. To your amazement, you learn that all these houses, thousands in number, are boarding-houses. Of course, where everybody is a stranger, nobody keeps house. It would be pardonable to suppose, that, out of so many boarding-houses, some would be in reality what they are in name. Nothing can be farther from the fact. These houses contain apartments more or less cheerless and badly furnished, according to the price (always exorbitant, however small it may ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... either by the microscope or the scalpel. Father Letheby was invited and went. I was rather glad he did go, for I felt that the village was rather dull for such a brilliant young fellow; and I had a kind of pardonable pride in thinking that he would be fully competent to meet on their own level any pretentious people that might stray hither from more civilized centres. There is hardly, indeed, any great risk of meeting too intellectual ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... from ignorance dispute about these questions, acting in a way that is pardonable; for ignorance is no proper subject for blame, but needs instruction. And they say that on the fourteenth the Lord ate the lamb ([Greek: to probaton]) with His disciples, but Himself suffered on the great day of unleavened bread, ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... effusion of love to her father, Tess read over many times. With pardonable pride she folded it carefully and placed it in the Bible where she had read about the cross and ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... lay the parchment, sickening him with its prevaricating if not lying face; and his invisible good angel kept pulling him on one side—nay, at last pulled him halfway across the room to where, absorbed in a reverie—pardonable under ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... Providence, may, with all reverence, be called providential. Those emotions which you experienced on first seeing her, and for which you were inclined to reproach yourself, were after all perfectly human, and therefore natural and pardonable. I needn't tell you now that I entirely disagree with those who consider that a man should cease to be a man when he becomes a clergyman. You are young, and you are made of flesh and blood. You were once very much in love with this young ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... Roland became very restless, and with a distressing effort constantly murmured the word "Denasia." Mr. Lanhearne thought he understood the position exactly, and he had a very pardonable hesitation in granting the half-made request. But the monotonous imploring became full of anguish, and he finally took his daughter into his councils and asked what ought ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... that one "makes copy" of himself and his friends—that nothing is too intimately sacred to be seized upon and dissected in print. Not so long ago, it was said that a certain man was "botanising on his mother's grave," a pardonable confusion, perhaps, of facts and realities. The bitter truth is that the writer lives his books—and not much else. From title to colophon, he escapes no pang, misses no joy. The life of the book is his ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... expected this gave real distinction to the Welcome Home, and Margaret was suffused with pardonable pride. But when she took her place in the check room, to attend to the coats and other belongings of the distinguished visitors—she was forgotten by her troop, and she remained there all during Tom's presentation. She never ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... fully, but know that you have not yet gained your point; I have too just cause to be incensed, and many things may perhaps ere then come to pass. Despair, when it breaks out, goes a great way; everything is pardonable when one has been deceived. If the ungrateful woman, out of compliment to your love, has just now pledged her word never to be mine, my righteous indignation will discover the means of preventing her ever ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... officers, officers with whom they were well acquainted, and in whose friendship they held a place, should command them, and when they saw these officers displaced and white strangers put in their stead, they felt a pardonable indignation, and took their own way of expressing it. As soldiers, their conduct in resisting ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... politely with a person of her quality;—I suppose Lady Kew had some such notions regarding people of rank: her long-suffering towards them was extreme; in fact, there were vices which the old lady thought pardonable, and even natural, in a young nobleman of high station, which she never would have excused ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... some female society in Warrenton, but the blue-coats engrossed it all. The young women were ardent partisans, but also very pretty; and treason, somehow, heightened their beauty. Disloyalty is always pardonable in a woman, and these ladies appreciated the fact. They refused to walk under Federal flags, and stopped their ears when the bands played national music; but every evening they walked through the main street, arm in arm with dashing Lieutenants and Captains. Many flirtations ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... replied with an air of complacency, as they walked on together. "I only arrived yesterday and she talked so much about you that I was consumed with a quite pardonable anxiety ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... able to demolish more conclusively the arguments of either form of intemperance; for he considers total abstinence as almost, if not quite, on a level with over indulgence. One's instinct of course shrinks at first from the idea of a deliberate clouding of the senses being ever pardonable, but the more one examines the matter the more innocent does it appear; and I freely admit that I have come to regard an offence against morals committed in the interest of science as not only excusable, but in some ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... parentage. The second Robert, the father of the poet, was the son of this union. In his early youth he was sent out to take charge of his mother's property, and his grandson, Robert Barrett Browning, relates with pardonable pride how he resigned the post, which was a lucrative one, because he could not tolerate the system of slave labor prevailing there. By this act he forfeited all the estate designed for him, and returned to England to face privation and to make his own way. ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... selfishness and self-will, and ready for obedience, to know when God speaks, though men may be His mouthpieces, and when men speak, though they may call themselves His messengers. The child's mistake was venial. It is less pardonable and more dangerous when repeated by us. If we would be guarded against it, we must be continually where Samuel was, and we must not sleep in the Temple, but 'watch and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... continued in his deep voice, in a tone of the most earnest conviction, "if envy were ever pardonable, he who presumed to feel it toward you might most speedily hope to find forgiveness. There is no physical or mental gift with which the Lord has not blessed you, and to fill the measure to overflowing, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... statute, and that a majority of the members of the Commission were obliged to travel from 160 to 450 miles to attend the meetings, its record for faithfulness to duty as shown by the above figures is one in which it may take a pardonable pride. ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... life of this poor man. His genius deserves some consideration; and he has just shown an almost superhuman amount of courage and dexterity. We do not know what may be the crimes for which your Holiness has seen fit to imprison him, but if they are pardonable we implore you ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... old gentleman who has favored us with his discontented musings, we must remark that the state of the country, so far as can be gathered from these papers, was of dismal augury for the tendencies of democratic rule. It was pardonable in the conservative of that day to mistake the temporary evils of a change for permanent diseases of the system which that change was to establish. A revolution, or anything that interrupts social order, may afford opportunities for the individual display of eminent virtues; ...
— Old News - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a favourite sketch of the imaginative youthful artist, who delights to portray scenes on a raft amid the tossing waters, where sweet and satiny ladies, in a pardonable abandonment to the exigencies of the occasion, are exhibiting the full energy and activity of creatures that existed before sentiment was born. The ladies of Brookfield had almost as utterly cast off their ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which she was the object. The Queen sought for the sweets of friendship; but can this gratification, so rare in any rank, exist between a Queen and a subject, when they are surrounded, moreover, by snares laid by the artifice of courtiers? This pardonable error was fatal to the happiness of ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... the poor dear lad's heart was still too sore to brook returning after the loss of his wife, who had now become the sweetest creature in the world; but Sir Philip's decision that the measure was wise, and the secrecy under the circumstances so expedient as to be pardonable, prevented all public blame; Mr. Fellowes, however, was drawn apart, and asked whether he suspected any other motive than was here declared, and which might make his pupil unwilling to face the parental brow, and he had declared that nothing could have been more exemplary ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... chattering to amuse oneself, of this incessant flow of commonplaces, always the same, that, by Jove, I blush even when other people talk like that. You are in a hurry, no doubt, to exhibit your acquirements; and I don't blame you, that's quite pardonable. I only wanted to find out what sort of man you are, for so many unscrupulous people have got hold of the progressive cause of late and have so distorted in their own interests everything they touched, that the whole cause has been dragged in the ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Frank, unselfish, truthful, and original, she had been as a child, with perhaps a little too much pride in her hair, which she hid once cut off to see how it would seem, and she was original, and truthful, and unselfish now, with a pardonable pride in her luxuriant tresses, which lay in waves upon her finely-shaped head and glistened in the sunlight like satin of a golden hue. But nothing could spoil Jerrie, not even the adulation of her friends or the looking-glass which told her she was beautiful, just as Nina ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... very new and very pronounced, with a beautiful line down each trouser-leg; and his collar and his tie were of the latest mode. His scanty hair was carefully parted in the middle, and his moustache bristled with a martial ardour. He had lately bought a fine set of artificial teeth, which, with pardonable pride, he constantly exhibited to the admiration of all and sundry. Major Forsyth's consuming desire was to appear juvenile; he affected slang, and carried himself with a youthful jauntiness. He vowed he felt ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... at the time, but now it recurred to her very distinctly. There was no suggestion of the sort in Beaumaroy's letter. Beaumaroy had written a letter that could be shown to Irechester! Was that dishonesty, or only a pardonable diplomacy? ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... my recollection, "A Continuation of the Deserted Village." He always brought a copy with him of an evening, and was fond of referring to it, and passing it round for the company to look at—a weakness pardonable in a garrulous old man. On revisiting the house, for old acquaintance sake, after an absence of some years from London, I missed him from his accustomed place, which I observed to be occupied by a stranger. On inquiry, I found that he was departed to where human vanity ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 392, Saturday, October 3, 1829. • Various
... test or the Noguchi emulsion be definitely determined. But surely every thinking man must realize that utility cannot exculpate, or justify the use of any method which is otherwise wrong in itself. A murder is not regarded as pardonable, because thereby the interests of religion are advanced. Dr. Noguchi for instance, admits that although it is almost certain that the germs which Schaudinn discovered and which he has isolated and grown outside the ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... endless petty formalities. Another thing—which your aunt has made me realize—as an American, you would have to excel the Italians in dignity in order to be thought to equal them. Things perfectly pardonable for them would finish you. You need only take your aunt and Kate Masco for your examples. Kate's behavior is not any worse than that of plenty of the born countesses, even. But that's just it—she isn't a countess born, and her ways won't do! Your aunt, on the other hand, is 'grande dame' ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... been so good as to interest himself in this little narrative will perhaps at this point exclaim with a pardonable consciousness of shrewdness: "Of course he went the next day to the Rue de Provence!" Of course, yes; only as it happens Bernard did nothing of the kind. He did one of the most singular things he ever did in his life—a thing that puzzled him even at the time, and with regard to which he often ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... unguarded expressions into which she might be betrayed, to watch you, and when we saw it was too late to prevent your sharing our secret, to make our hold upon you such that you would feel it to your own advantage to keep it with us, was perhaps only pardonable in persons situated as we were. But, Constance, while with Guy the feeling that made this last task easy was one of selfish passion only, mine from the first possessed a depth and fervency which made the very thought of wooing ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... Walter, swelling with pardonable pride. "I am going there on business." "Have you ever been there ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... of so few days ago appeared now, in the biassed light of circumstance, a pardonable, a forgettable offence. He had loved her; he had wanted to marry her; he had, with that in mind, tricked her. He had taken advantage of the universal admission that in love as in war all things were fair. The ugliness of what he had done was chiefly ugly because it had lain against ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... men, think you, that those delicate nuances and tints and shades are harmonised and put together? Such a conceit is only pardonable in a set of beings who possess not the delicate faculty of "detail," and who, with a limited knowledge of even cardinal colours, describe the graces and beauties of a toilette by saying the wearer had on something white, or something black, or something red, but "it suited her down to ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... greedy harpies, dragging, if they can, the very bed from under his wife and helpless children, and appropriating all which by any kind of maneuvering, they can possibly transfer to their already overgrown coffers! With much the same spirit, more pardonable to be sure in an insect, the bees from other hives, will gather round the one which is being broken up, and while the disconsolate owners are lamenting over their ruined prospects, will, with all imaginable rapacity and ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... dismiss these brilliant phantasmagoria with the charitable reflection, that the extravagance of overweening hopefulness is, at least in an age which has witnessed the advent of steam and electricity, more natural and more pardonable than the scepticism of confirmed despondency; and that "he who shoots at the stars," though missing his aim, will at all events shoot higher than he who aims at the mud beneath ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... world judgeth." He declared himself in favor of a general council, and spoke with satisfaction of an edict just despatched to Scotland, "to surcease the punishment of men for religion." "And of this purpose," adds the ambassador with pardonable sarcasm, "he made suche an oration as it were long to write, evon as thoughe he had bene hired by the Protestants to defend their cause earnestly!" Despatch to the queen, Feb. 27, 1559/60, Forbes, State ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... to us the principles upon which her well-founded business of rent collecting was established, and with pardonable pride showed us the Red Cross Square with its cottages marvelously picturesque and comfortable, on two sides, and on the third a public hall and common drawing room for the use of all the tenants; the interior of the latter had been decorated by pupils of Walter Crane with mural frescoes ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... and fifteen hundred dollars in money was found upon his person, besides an excellent and valuable gold watch. Without waiting for any further results, Manning rushed to the telegraph office, in order to apprise me of his success. He could not repress a pardonable feeling of pride in the victory he had accomplished. His search was ended, his man was a prisoner, and shortly afterward there came clicking over the wires ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... expressed themselves with reserve and caution, saw no reason to court the anger of Charles by meddling in a quarrel in which they had no interest; they revenged the studied slight which had been passed by Henry on themselves, with a pardonable indifference ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... back by confused orders, pardonable at such a time. The eager Nelson was detained at Savannah by Buell, who thought that the sounds of the engagement they heard in the Shiloh woods was a minor affair, and who wanted Nelson to wait for boats to ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of officers to go out to America. Those I have engaged are I trust in general of the best character; but that I should engage, or rather take from the hands of some leading men here, some one or two among the rest not so accomplished, cannot be surprising, and may, considering my situation, be pardonable, but I have no suspicion of any such in my department, of consequence. I have been offered troops from Germany on the following general terms, viz.;—officers to recruit as for the service of France, and embark ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... revolver, took a long, steady aim, and fired. The bullet whistled past across the prairie. His second shot scored a clean hit. With pardonable pride he turned to ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... Patty? What have you done?" the others demanded, divided between a pardonable feeling of curiosity and a sense that they ought to retire ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... always on the alert, and fires up on the slightest provocation. Say everything you like, except that Norway in any respect is surpassed by any other country. One is assailed with questions about his impressions of the scenery, people, government, &c.—a very natural and pardonable curiosity, it is true, and one only demands in return that his candour be respected, and no offence taken. This, however, is rarely the case. If there is no retaliatory answer on the spot, you hear a remark days afterwards which shows how your mild censure has rankled in the mind of ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... or less, young Dallas came to discern and understand in the course of his associations with the father and daughter. And now it was with a little pardonable pride and a good deal of growing tenderness for the child, that he saw the change going on in Esther. She was always, now as before, quiet as a mouse in her father's presence; truly she was quiet as a mouse everywhere; but under the outward quiet ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... if sent up for punishment on the charge of bad language and impudence, could hardly in justice be less than Orbilian or Draconic. But he was apparently if not assuredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare of presenting the most infamous of murderers as an erring but pardonable transgressor, not unfit to be received back with open arms by the wife he has attempted, after a series of the most hideous and dastardly outrages, to despatch by poison. The excuse for Heywood is simply that in his day as in Chaucer's ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of the garden during vacation, gathered the vegetables as they ripened, and with pardonable pride carried them home to their parents. The parents, in turn, were gratified and as much interested as the children. Several of the boys had individual appliances made by their fathers for use in the garden. Often on Monday mornings would come ...
— Construction Work for Rural and Elementary Schools • Virginia McGaw
... otherwise. But a great man—as, perhaps, you do not know—attains his normal condition only through the inspiration of one great idea. As a friend of Mr. Hollingsworth, and, at the same time, a calm observer, I must tell you that he seems to me such a man. But you are very pardonable for fancying him ridiculous. Doubtless, he is so—to you! There can be no truer test of the noble and heroic, in any individual, than the degree in which he possesses the faculty ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that she must have gone down almost immediately after being washed clear. There was about a fathom and a half of water over her poop, and as we gazed down upon the craft, clearly visible through the crystal waters of the lagoon, poor Mrs Vansittart shed a few pardonable tears over the grave of the ship of which she had been so proud, and which she had loved ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... Little did he dream that his devises (with an introduction by Professor Sir Walter Raleigh) would be still giving his Friends pleasure over three hundred years later. The compiler of the catalogue says here with modest and pardonable pride "strongly bound in exceptionally tough paper and more than once described by reviewers as leather. Some of the books are here printed for the first time, the rest are reproductions of the original editions, many having ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself—"but the other doesn't count, because he ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... George, with a pardonable satisfaction in spinning the matter out, "one was all covered with notes, and was headed 'Padley.' I read that through, sir. It had to do with the buildings and the acres, and so forth. The second paper I could make nothing out of; it was in cypher, I think. The third ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... that they loved not nature less but man more. Jack tripped up this ungallant speech by remarking that if Mavick was in this mood he did not know why he came ashore. And Van Dam said that sooner or later all men went ashore. This thin sort of talk was perhaps pardonable after the weariness of a sea voyage, but the Major promptly said it wouldn't do. And the Major seemed to be in charge ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a careless word, Effie,' said Mrs Maurice, 'you admit that this little girl was guilty of thoughtlessness, and surely you cannot consider that no fault—but under certain circumstances this fault is more pardonable than under others. Now you know nothing of these circumstances, and so could not, if you wished, be Rosa Lynmore's judge. But, taking everything as it appears, you may draw your lesson without assuming a province which does not belong ...
— Effie Maurice - Or What do I Love Best • Fanny Forester
... engine which propelled the car backwards and forwards. Thus we may almost say that the first conveyance across the Zambesi was an electric tram. And the passengers (particularly on the first journey) were not pleased with the trip. They shrank with pardonable terror when they found themselves suspended over that awful gulf by a slender cord that swayed against the sky. But ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... penetrating glance. It was in middle age that she first heard the Gospel, an indirect influence of the opium refuge work; for Mrs. Liang had never smoked opium, nor had any member of her family. A neighbour, however, had, and on her return from the Refuge she produced with pardonable pride the copy of St. John's Gospel which she had bought, and better still, could read. It was hard for Mrs. Liang to see the former degraded opium smoker ahead of her in learning, and she persuaded her husband to give her the needed help. She borrowed the book and started at the ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... Omar blurted out with pardonable passion. Then he asked, "Thou desirest a service of ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... social security than the United States? Is it not a fact that relations between capital and labor on the basis of collective bargaining are much further advanced in Great Britain than in the United States? It is perhaps not strange that the conservative British press has told us with pardonable irony that much of our New Deal program is only an attempt to catch up with English reforms that go back ten years ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt
... pardonable exasperation. "That's all you know about it! And what am I to say to the lady it ...
— The Tinted Venus - A Farcical Romance • F. Anstey
... which, in an earlier period of their intercourse, politeness requires the exact observance. Inquiries into our condition are allowable when they are prompted by a disinterested concern for our welfare; and this solicitude is not only pardonable, but may justly be demanded from those who chuse us for their companions. This state of things was more slow to arrive on this occasion than on most others, on account of the gravity and loftiness of ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... he said loftily: "The sea beholds its conqueror and trembles before him!" It sounds bombastic, but in the mouth of one who had first guided a civilized keel over its surface, such arrogance is at least pardonable. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... refers to Mr. Richard Vaux, an eminent citizen and member of a highly respected old Quaker family, who in his youth had been an attache of the American Legation in London. One of his letters home narrated with pardonable pride that he had danced with the Princess Victoria at a royal ball and had found her a very charming partner. His mother replied: "It pleaseth me much, Richard, to hear of thy success at the ball in Buckingham Palace; but thee must remember it would ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... he had himself avowed. (For as to that malicious purpose which Sophia suspected, it never once entered into the head of Mr Allworthy.) He at length concluded with again blaming the action as inconsiderate, and which, he said, was pardonable only ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... but I was informed by one of the private pupils who exercised considerable authority over the younger boys, that although I might study the violin with the dancing-master, I was never to practise it by myself. This restriction was pardonable in one who might reasonably dread the torturing attempts of a beginner, but it was certainly not favorable to my progress. However, in course of time it came to be relaxed; that is, as soon ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... his own prejudices, when he determined to call on the Rev. McSnagley for advice. This decision was somewhat humiliating to his pride, as he and McSnagley were not friends. But he thought of Mliss, and the evening of their first meeting; and perhaps with a pardonable superstition that it was not chance alone that had guided her willful feet to the schoolhouse, and perhaps with a complacent consciousness of the rare magnanimity of the act, he choked back his ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... had since March 1, 1651-2, "lived peaceably"—but with the supplementary proviso, required by his Highness, that, while "having lived peaceably" since Worcester would suffice for the miscellaneous Royalists of 1650-51, who were indeed nearly the whole population of Scotland, the less pardonable Hamiltonians of 1648 would have to pass much stricter tests. In Ireland, though Protestants generally were to be qualified, there was to be like caution in admitting such as, though faithful before March 1, 1649-50, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... The common expressions which go to make up the body of the discourse, will present themselves spontaneously. Your periods, perhaps, will be less harmonious, your transitions less ingenious, an ill placed word will sometimes escape you; but all this is pardonable. The animation of your delivery will compensate for these blemishes, and you will be master of your own feelings, and those of your hearers. There will, perhaps, be apparent throughout a certain disorder, but it will not prevent your pleasing and affecting me; your action as well as ...
— Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching • Henry Ware
... the grandeur of nature? I sang aloud, at the top of my voice. The thunder roared, the lightning flashed, the grass whispered, while I sang and felt myself in close kinship with nature's music. I was delirious, and it was pardonable, for it harmed no one but myself. I was filled with the desire to absorb, as much as possible, the mighty, living beauty and force that was raging on the steppe; and to get closer to it. A tempest at sea, and a thunderstorm on the steppes! I know nothing grander in ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... I knew before, yet the hard Word Runs harshly thro my Heart;— If thou hadst murder'd fifty Royal Ferdinands, And with inglorious Chains as many Years Had loaded all my Limbs, 't had been more pardonable Than this eternal Stain upon my Name: —Oh, thou hast breath'd ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... other being blind, he was in total darkness. When he was carried down, the surgeon—in the midst of a scene scarcely to be conceived by those who have never seen a cockpit in time of action, and the heroism which is displayed amid its horrors,—with a natural and pardonable eagerness, quitted the poor fellow then under his hands, that he might instantly attend the admiral. "No!" said Nelson, "I will take my turn with my brave fellows." Nor would he suffer his own wound to be examined till every man who had been previously wounded was ...
— The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson • Robert Southey
... could only find some way to lengthen the life of our storage batteries," said Bob, not without a pardonable touch of pride, "we wouldn't have much to complain about. But that battery ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... church boards with me," she told the Grenoble woman, with pardonable pride. "I don't know of anybody else that takes boarders in Brookville." She added that she ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... estimate of Newton by Lagrange. "The celebrated Lagrange," he says, "who frequently asserted that Newton was the greatest genius that ever existed, used to add—'and the most fortunate, for we cannot find MORE THAN ONCE a system of the world to establish.'" With pardonable exaggeration the admiring followers of the great generalizer ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... be the whig lord chancellor, and on the 22nd he actually took his place on the woolsack. His title was Baron Brougham and Vaux, but, though he lived to retain it for nearly forty years, he always preferred, with pardonable vanity, to sign his name as ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... false pretences. You pretend to yourselves and to each other that you have come out of a love of sport, but you have not done so, and you know it. Sport is a plausible pleasure; to love horses and take delight in their fleetness is a pardonable vanity, but you are here to practise an unpardonable vice. You have come to gamble, and your gambling is attended by every form of intemperance and immorality. I am not afraid to tell you so, for God has laid upon me a plain message, and I intend to do my duty. These race-courses ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... the other inhabitants of the valley; for they saw nothing remarkable in his way of life, save that, when the labor of the day was over, he still loved to go apart and gaze and meditate upon the Great Stone Face. According to their idea of the matter, it was a folly, indeed, but pardonable, inasmuch as Ernest was industrious, kind, and neighborly, and neglected no duty for the sake of indulging this idle habit. They knew not that the Great Stone Face had become a teacher to him, and that the sentiment which was expressed in it would enlarge ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... court, and the sixteenth century closes round you. It is a pardonable flight of fancy to say that the expressive faces of an age in which human passions lay very near the surface seem to look out at you from the windows, from the balconies, from the thick foliage of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James |
