United States or Brazil ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
They were no longer alone in the library; two other men had strolled in, and were seated reading; on this account, Lord Dymchurch subdued his voice even more than usual, for he had a horror of appearing to talk pretentiously, or of talking at all when his words might fall upon indifferent ears.
A sufficiently inane story, and by no means certainly true; but there is enough character in this little feat, ponderous, deliberate, pompous, ostentatious, and at bottom a trick and deceitful quibble, to make it accord with the grandiloquent public manner of Columbus, and to make it easily believable of one who chose to show himself in his speech and writings so much more meanly and pretentiously than he showed himself in the true acts and business of his life.
And lose the exquisite pleasure of toiling to buy my wife new dresses and knick-knacks? Après tout, Mathilde is quite as intelligent as any other daughter of Eve, whose first thought when she came to reflective consciousness was a new dress. All great men are mateless, 'tis only their own ribs they fall in love with. A more cultured woman would only have misunderstood me more pretentiously.
The woman was not unattractive, though rather bold and hard in bearing. She was dark, pretentiously made-up, and rather elegantly dressed. The gentleman was a quiet, handsome fellow, dressed in sober black. When they sailed in, I supposed they were the jefe's personal friends.
M. Wilkie was comfortably lodged; but his rooms were most pretentiously ornamented. They were indeed decorated in more than doubtful taste. There were very few books lying about, but costly riding-whips, spurs, rifles, cartridge-boxes, and all the paraphernalia of a fashionable sporting man, were here in abundance.
Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outside view of himself for years, and I resolved to stand up to him. We went at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all ownership and also an educated man of the vilest, most pretentiously superior description.
Could it be possible that there was really anything substantial at the bottom of Wertheimer's wild yarn about the pretentiously named "International Underworld Unlimited"? Was this really a demonstration of purpose to crush out competition "and hang the expense"? Or was there some less superficially tangible motive to be sought?
"So I up and saddled the bronc' and lit out for home," concluded the narrator with the air of one justly proud of his own self-abnegating virtue. The "town" where the judge above-mentioned dwelt was one of those squalid pretentiously named little clusters of make-shift dwellings which on the edge of the wild country spring up with the rapid growth of mushrooms, and are often no longer lived.
For this would seem to be the one inflexible law governing all living organisms, from which there can be no divergence in any such sense as the "scientific genesis," pretentiously so called, would authoritatively indicate. No "increase in variety," which Mr. Spencer regards as the "essential characteristic of all progress," will ever enable us "to gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles."
The meanly equipped and pretentiously conducted private schools of Great Britain, staffed with ignorant and incapable young men, exist, on the other hand, to witness that public education is no matter to be left to merely commercial enterprise working upon parental ignorance and social prejudice.
Word Of The Day