"Dulled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be ready to suffer. She cannot allow her emotions to be dulled or polluted, for these are to create her life's atmosphere, apart from which her world would be dark and dead. This leaves her heart without any protection of insensibility, at the mercy of the hurts and insults of life. Women of India, like women everywhere, have their share of suffering, ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... shepherds; the loneliness and silence of the night; the sudden, startling brightness that shone about them, and enveloped their angel visitant, who kindly soothed their alarm with "Fear not;" and the outburst of angelic song, unheard by the ears dulled with sleep, but overpowering these astonished men. "O happy shepherds! who alone among men, were ever privileged to hear the songs ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... filled with strange dreams; but as soon as the eyes open, and I regain consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart.... Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him on my path. To-day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure of his hand, I feel something else ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... as they set out together again soon after six. Rain had fallen in the night, yet not all the rain that there was overhead. There were still clouds hanging, mixed with the smoke from the chimneys; the hedges seemed dulled and black in spite of their green; the cinder path they walked on was depressing, the rain-fed road even more so. They passed a dozen men on their way to the pits, who made remarks on the three, and retaliation ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... among us who have not suffered from too early familiarity with the Bible and the conceptions of religion. Even for a man of really strong and independent intellect it may be many years before the precociously dulled feelings become fresh again, before the fetters of routine fall off, and he is enabled at last to approach the Bible with fresh receptivity and to realize, for the first time in his life, the treasures of art and beauty and divine wisdom it contains. But ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... is sometimes said that the use of strong perfumes by women indicates a dulled olfactory organ. On the other hand, it is said that the use of tobacco deadens the sensitiveness of the masculine nose. Both these statements seem to be without foundation. The use of a large amount of perfume ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... bursting forth like a hundred trumpets, the three belfries, humming like hives of huge bees, that whole orchestra on which bounded a gigantic scale, ascending, descending incessantly from the voice of a throng to that of one bell, dulled her memory, her imagination, her grief. The bells, in particular, lulled her. It was something like a powerful magnetism which those vast instruments shed ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... head of the illustrious house of that name, for forty years general and tyrant of the Republic of Lucca. Both palaces bear his arms, graven on marble tablets beside the entrance. Both are of brick, now dulled and mellowed into a reddish white. Both have walls of enormous thickness. The windows of the upper stories—quadruple casements divided, Venetian-like, by twisted pillarettes richly carved—are ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... bushes until they could have reached out and touched the spy with the muzzles of their rifles, and still he did not stir. Into that heavy and weary brain, plunged into dulled slumbers, entered no thought of a stalking foe. The fire sank and the bent back sagged a little lower. Garay had traveled hard and long. He was anxious to get back to Albany with what he knew, and he felt sure that the northern ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... usual sights. He loathed them, and then he cursed himself because he loathed them. His mother's love had taken a cross turn, because he had kept the tempting supper she had prepared for him waiting until it was nearly spoilt. Alice, her dulled senses deadening day by day, sat mutely near the fire: her happiness bounded by the consciousness of the presence of her foster-child, knowing that his voice repeated what was passing to her deafened ear, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... I left my room, I saw placed in line before the door his boots and mine. His were little laced-up boots rather out of shape, and dulled by the rough usage to which he subjects them. The sole of the left boot was worn thin, and a little hole was threatening at the toe of the right. The laces, worn and slack, hung to the right and left. Swellings in the leather marked the places ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... the rich people at the Wegg farm had ceased to be objects of wonder to the Millville folk. The girls were still regarded with curious looks when they wandered into the village on an errand, and Mr. Merrick and Major Doyle inspired a certain amount of awe; but time had dulled the edge of marvelous invasion and the city people were now accepted as a ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... the tent. Everybody—married men and women, maidens and young men, girls, boys, and little children—was ravenously hungry, and for a few minutes little could be heard but the plying of the viands. But as the first edge of hunger became dulled the edge of wit sharpened, and laughter and banter rollicked back and forward through the tent. The doctor, now quite sober, took a census, and found the total population to be twenty-eight. These he classified as twelve married, eight eligible, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... a kind and motherly way of my bereavement, and the generosity of youth somehow prevented my appreciation of this being dulled by the fact that, until reminded, she had forgotten whether I had lost a father or a mother. Indeed, though not greatly interested in other folk's affairs, I believe that while the good soul's eyes rested upon the supposed ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... muffled sounds from the cellar below, never heard there before; and once, wrapping a shawl about her, she stole down the stairways with bare feet, and saw streams of red light through the chinks of the cellar-door, and heard the ring of metal, and muttered oaths, all carefully dulled by such devices as kept the sounds from chance passers in the street, though vain as far as the inhabitants of the house itself were concerned. Trembling and cold, she stole back to her bed, full of doubts and fears, neither of which she dared whisper to any one, or would have dared, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... carrier pigeon to recover his mate and dwelling place from the distance of hundreds of miles away. In civilized men, however, the habit of the home and street and the disuse of the ancient freedom has dulled, and in some instances almost destroyed, all sense of this shape of the external world. The best training to recover this precious capacity will now be ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... much trouble nor get in any great alarm, for I suppose the severe exertion dulled everything, and robbed my sufferings of their poignancy as I still swam on more and more slowly, with my starting eyes fixed upon the boat still many yards away from me, and growing more and more dim as the water began to ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... Vauvenargues, thus disappointed in Voltaire as he had been disappointed in Mirabeau, to examine into the sources of the low moral condition of the age. He attributed it to "le mepris de la gloire," and he set himself to define this quality and to impress it, with all the force of repetition, on the dulled consciences of his contemporaries. ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... social recognition among whites here"; and in conclusion this editorial said: "The South only pities the daughter that she should have allowed herself to be used by a father whose sensibilities and ideas of the proprieties are so dulled by his asinine qualities that he could not see the ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... is one streak of dead calm, which reflects the green mountain perfectly from edge to edge of it. There is another calm shaped like a great river, which is all green, touched with crimson. Besides these there are delicate half calms, just dulled over with faint breathings of the evening air; these, for the most part being violet (from the sky), except at a distance, where they take a deep crimson; and there is one piece of crimson calm near me set between a faint violet breeze ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... toppling over all that was left of the orator, would still speak of the wonders of his eloquence; were comely women to whom the household was the world and the household task the life's work, but who could now for the moment lift their bent forms and have their dulled eyes turned to higher and better things. Moreover, there were in that room a score of deep eyes that could not but quicken at the sight of a slender, manly figure, clad in scholastic black, of a thin, earnest face, with beetled brows and a classic forehead from which ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... faint haze dulled the palms away on the other side; from the wharf, where ships were loading up with rubber, ivory, palm-oil, and bales of gum copal, the roar and rattle of steam-winches went across the water, far away across the glittering water, where the red flamingoes were flying, to that other ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the angels of Guccio at Perugia, and sinking not unfrequently into the commonplace of easygoing triviality, as in the common floral traceries of Milanese windows. But it is never laboured, never pedantic, never dulled by the painful effort to subdue an obstinate material to the artist's will. If marble is required to develop the strength of the few supreme sculptors, terra-cotta saves intact the fancies of a crowd of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... entering, a few men leaning back in their chairs against the wall of the living-room reading the papers or smoking their pipes, and perhaps a few others leisurely overhauling the apparatus, making minor repairs, or polishing up some detail the weather had dulled. At night, too, with the radiance of the moon making a pathway of silver across the gentle swell of the sleepy surf, he would doubtless wonder at their continued idle life as he watched the two surfmen separate ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... stupefaction, and mingled with it a sort of lingering pride that his comrades had been the victors, although he himself was a prisoner. He did not know whether they would kill him or take him with them, and at that moment his mind was so dulled that he felt little curiosity about ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... land in our turn? All over the world the voice of liberty is heard now, clear and strong, bidding the people assert themselves and claim right and justice. Are our ears alone deaf to the high call? Has the pursuit of riches dulled our souls? Is the clink of gold and silver so loud in our ears that we can hear ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... far away northward—and a nucleus of brighter light on the meridian showed the position of a gibbous moon. Yet the hazy, uniform light, disciplining the eye to its standard, seemed rather like a noonday dulled to the same shade. The temperature was perfect for comfort, so I fared well enough; whilst with respect to my horses, I could only hope that Bert had been unfaithful to his chief ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... the ground in front of one of the white houses near the tower perimeter, Captain Strong stirred, shook his head, and painfully rose to a half-crouch. With eyes still dulled by shock, he looked around to see Astro lying unconscious a few feet away. His brain still reeling from the effects of Coxine's sneak attack, he staggered over ...
— On the Trail of the Space Pirates • Carey Rockwell
... the eye is so gross that many such creatures, with innumerable particulars in each, appear to it as an obscure speck, and yet those who are sensual think and judge by that sight, it is clear how dulled their minds are, and therefore what thick darkness they are in ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... a thorough dislike to being an author; and, if it would not look like begging you to compliment one by contradicting me, I would tell you what I am most seriously convinced of, that I find what small share of parts I had grown dulled. And when I perceive it myself, I may well believe that others would not be less sharp-sighted. It is very natural; mine were spirits rather than parts; and as time has rebated the one, it must surely destroy their ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... removed. Gone were all my pigmy troubles, vanished into nothingness. Engulfed in a common ruin lay all fragments of desire; the search for reward, the dread of punishment—all petty figments of the imagination were powerful now no more. The fall of reason crushed every human hope and dulled the edge of every human fear. What cared I now for food, for water; for honor or for shame? My mind, imperial and free from artificial restraints, plunged riotously into forbidden realms, I reveled in the exaltation of chainless thought, and drank from the deepest wells of rebellion ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... folk, our brains dulled by the slowly acquired habit of not thinking, do wrong to torture children with these awful themes. Eternity, Heaven, Hell are meaningless words to us. We repeat them, as we gabble our prayers, telling our smug, self-satisfied selves that we are miserable ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... our men, women, and youths today, promotes restlessness and the craving for excitement. The normal all-round occupations of primitive men tended to work off their energies and satisfy their natural impulses. But the dulled and tired worker released from eight or ten hours' drudgery in a factory is apt to be in a psychological state that demands variety, excitement, pleasure at any cost. It does not pay to repress human nature too much, or to try ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... at your elbow," said the voice, coming dulled, from a further apartment. "Doubtless you would be more comfortable ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... beneath the covering I pressed upon the jewelled eyeballs. I had not gazed upon the blue diamonds since the day when I had restored the two stones shown to the banian merchant in Lahore. As the wheels now clicked and the muffled bell commenced its dulled clangor, the uneasy thought came to my mind that perhaps the treasure had in the interval been spirited away by some devilish jugglery. But when at last silence fell, and I whipped the cloth aside, there reposed ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... in Paris in our days by a capital execution, one might suppose that the execution of so many persons at one time would produce a very great emotion. But habit had so dulled sensibility that people paid but little attention to the matter at last. Mothers would take their children to see people guillotined as to-day they take them to ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... were dulled to danger and did not care what risk they ran and so they called to the men in a friendly Spanish greeting. There was instantly a great hubbub, and two men charged down upon them, preceded by a couple of fierce-looking mongrels. These came dashing for them with red, gaping mouths. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... was a sort of mockery of abundance. Dabs of vegetables, sauces, preserves, meats, both hot and cold, in cheap little china dishes fairly elbowed each other for room. It would have dulled a keener appetite than ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... altogether. The wonderful lips rested half over the even teeth, the breath was in the nostrils only, the eyes dulled, the face set grey, and through the glove the hand ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... of it all. The little frown was portentous of deep-laid designs. She would break down this cruel barrier that kept Baldos from the fields over which prejudice alone held sway. Her love for him and her determination to be his wife were not in the least dulled by ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... one shoulder against the roof, reaching up into the hole he had made, still cutting away with this once keen knife, which was now dulled and blunted. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... were not in the humor for dying just then. The long imprisonment, the privations of hunger, the scourging by the elements, the death of four out of every five of our number had indeed dulled and stupefied us—bred an indifference to our own suffering and a seeming callosity to that of others, but there still burned in our hearts, and in the hearts of every one about us, a dull, sullen, smoldering fire of hate and defiance toward everything Rebel, and a lust for revenge upon those ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... what I had, no matter how much more money he makes. He has only his five senses and once these are satisfied he's no better off than a man who satisfies these same senses on eight dollars a week. Generally he's worse off because in a year or so he has probably dulled them all. Rockefeller himself probably never in his life got half the fun out of anything that I did in just crawling into my clean bed at night with every tired muscle purring contentedly and my mind at rest about the next day. I doubt ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... glare of brightness in which Celia's face seemed to be framed, edged with infernal light. . . . And another face, Camilla's, was there in the confusing brilliancy; and she reeled a little, embraced, held hot and close; and in her dulled ears drummed Celia's voice, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... our lunch," said Challenger as the boom of a gong sounded through the house. "We have a cook whose omelettes are only excelled by her cutlets. We can but trust that no cosmic disturbance has dulled her excellent abilities. My Scharzberger of '96 must also be rescued, so far as our earnest and united efforts can do it, from what would be a deplorable waste of a great vintage." He levered his great bulk off the desk, upon which he had sat while he announced ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Chinese, Tai-K'an evidently nursed his grievance, and time had not dulled the bitterness ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... passing away without pain; the injuries she had received had dulled sensation, while they ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... meseemeth he, Nay passing Gods (and that can be!) Who all the while sits facing thee Sees thee and hears Thy low sweet laughs which (ah me!) daze 5 Mine every sense, and as I gaze Upon thee (Lesbia!) o'er me strays * * * * My tongue is dulled, my limbs adown Flows subtle flame; with sound its own 10 Rings either ear, and o'er are strown Mine eyes ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... had arrived, and were ready to fall upon their rear. Closely pressed by the Persians, they drew back to the narrowest part of the pass, where they had fought on the preceding days, and there made their last stand. Their spears were broken, their swords were dulled; but even had their weapons been still of the best, it would have availed them little, for the Persians, all too well acquainted now with the Greek daring, refused to close with their enemies. In their well-nigh useless armour, which had been hacked from ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... before the reading aloud began, he would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection, his love of a good tune was strong. I never heard him hum more than one tune, the Welsh song "Ar hyd y nos," which he went through correctly; he used also, I believe, to hum a little Otaheitan song. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... she was unaware; lost to everything but the joy of contact with her son. The pang of parting had been dulled to a hidden ache; but always the blank was there, however amply filled with other claims on heart and spirit. A larger schoolroom now: and Nevil, with his new Eastern picture on hand, making constant demands on her—as usual—in the initial stages; till the subject ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... week was one of bitter disillusion, though for Quentin no such despair was possible. For him it was an attempt at joy and beauty that had failed. This dulled, drugged looking girl was not the radiant woman he had hoped to find. Vain and sensitive as he was, he felt, almost immediately, that he had lost his charm for her; that she had ceased to love him. That was the ugly, the humiliating side of the truth, the side that so filled Amabel Channice's ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... history,—brilliant in its social gayety, in its intellectual activities, and in the splendor of its achievements. The stimulus of the age spurred men far in good and evil. Apuleius studied at Carthage, and afterward at Rome, both philosophy and religion, though this bias seems not to have dulled his taste for worldly pleasure. Poor in purse, he finally enriched himself by marrying a wealthy widow and inheriting her property. Her will was contested on the ground that this handsome and accomplished young literary man had ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... a Christian who has lost sanctifying grace by a grievous sin. An "obdurate" sinner is one who, by repeatedly and maliciously transgressing the laws of God, has dulled his intellect and hardened his will against salutary inspirations. A man may be an habitual sinner (consuetudinarius) and a backslider, without being obdurate, or, which comes to the same, impenitent. ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... intone it, like to imitate the rumbling and gurgling of water-pipes, others the grating of rattles, the creaking of pullies, the grinding of a crane, but, in spite of all, its beauty remains, unextinguished, dulled though it be, by the wild ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... and near midnight, we pushed out again. My vigilance and susceptibility were rather sharpened than dulled by the waiting; and the features of the night had also deepened and intensified. Night was at its meridian. The sky had that soft luminousness which may often be observed near midnight at this season, and the "large few stars" beamed ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... not only the early extinction of the Roman drama, but generally the inferiority of Rome to Greece in every department of the fine arts. The fine temper of Roman sensibility, which no culture could have brought to the level of the Grecian, was thus dulled for every application.] as much as men, and children intermingled with both, looked on with leisurely indifference, with anxious expectation, or with rapturous delight, whilst below them were passing the direct sufferings of humanity, and not seldom its ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... of which depended the life of his patient. He had been taught to cause the cruelest pain with unshaken nerve by the fact that a human life under his knife depended upon the steadiness of his hand. But his sympathy had never been dulled—only controlled and hidden. So, long years of contact with what might be called a disease of society, had accustomed him to the sight of conditions—the revelation of which came with such a shock to the younger man. But the Doctor could ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... scissors soon reduced his beard sufficiently for the dulled razors to perform approximately their office. Cutting his own hair was beyond the hermit's skill. So he only combed and brushed it backward as smoothly as he could. Charity forbids us to consider the ...
— Options • O. Henry
... Goddesse! Queene of Beauty, Mother of Love and of all worlds delight, 16 Without whose soverayne grace and kindly dewty Nothing on earth seems fayre to fleshly sight, Doe thou vouchsafe with thy love-kindling light T'illuminate my dim and dulled eyne, 20 And beautifie this sacred ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... exactly the same reason: that at first the mind is roused and works on these Objects with its powers at full tension; just as they who are gazing stedfastly at anything; but afterwards the act of Working is not of the kind it was at first, but careless, and so the Pleasure too is dulled. ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... alone to darkness and to that dulled and dogged state of mind when a man thinks that Misery must now have done her worst, and is almost glad to think so. He turned and walked slowly towards the stile; she had told him no hour, and he was determined, whenever she came, that she should find ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sorry he isn't at home!" Marie exclaimed, enjoying the blank disappointment that dulled Idina's expression. When she had produced her effect, she added that Angelo would come back in time for luncheon. Miss Bland turned her face away and looked down at a fountain on the terrace below the loggia. Fierceness flashed out of her like a knife unsheathed; but the back of her blond head, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Tabby—now nearly eighty years of age—the assistance of a girl. Tabby relinquished any of her work with jealous reluctance, and could not bear to be reminded, though ever so delicately, that the acuteness of her senses was dulled by age. The other servant might not interfere with what she chose to consider her exclusive work. Among other things, she reserved to herself the right of peeling the potatoes for dinner; but as she was growing ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... she have sent her servants in our pain, If she have fought with Death and dulled his sword, If she have given back our sick again And to the breast the weakling lips restored, Is it a little thing that she has wrought? Then Life and ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... that the man was not in his right senses, or that the blow he had received had so dulled his bump of caution, that he could no longer take care of himself; for the next moment he stumbled over a little child, and would have been hurt severely if I had not broken his fall, by catching his arm before he again measured ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... in my fifteenth year and possessed of a growing appetite for adventure. A very few months had so dulled the memory of my sufferings in the dugout that I had forgotten all about my resolve to forsake the frontier forever. I looked about me for something new and still ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... immovable, but a mysterious Something, not of earth, was struggling with him. Was it the faith of that decrepit old woman in that bare little room across the sea, mumbling to herself that God had not forgotten? God knows. His ear is not dulled; His arm is not shortened; His holy ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... of the lack of chemical action between vegetable fibers and coloring matter. But the varied uses to which dyed articles are put make fastness of color absolutely necessary. A shirt, for example, must not be discolored by perspiration, nor a waist faded by washing, nor a carpet dulled by sweeping with a dampened broom. In order to insure permanency of dyes, an indirect method was originated which consisted of adding to the fibers a chemical capable of acting upon the dye and forming with it a colored compound insoluble in water, and hence "safe." For example, cotton material ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... the radiant countenance of the girl from Unaka. Not so the young women looked after a few months of factory life. He was getting to know well the odd jail-bleach the cotton mill puts on country cheeks, the curious, dulled, yet resentful expression of the eyes, begotten by continuous repetition of excessive hours of trivial, monotonous toil. Would this girl come at last to that favour? He was a little surprised at the strength of protest ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... of every sufferer from doubting folly to say to himself, "I will perform this act once with my whole attention, then leave it and turn my mind in other channels before I have dulled my perception ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... garden bright and pure, Lost, that calm day too perfect to endure, And lost the child-like love that worshipped and was sure! For men have dulled their eyes with sin, And dimmed the light of heaven with doubt, And built their temple walls to shut thee in, And framed their iron creeds to shut thee out. But not for thee the closing of the door, O Spirit unconfined! ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... It was a dulled voice she spoke in, quite unlike her usual eager way of giving information. She, poor thing, was terribly afraid he would ask her why they did not seem acquainted with her, and it would have been a painful humiliation ...
— Hooking Watermelons - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... would not, in the meantime, suffer this edge and forwardness of his men to be dulled or rebated, by lying still idly unemployed, as knowing right well by continual experience, that no sickness was more noisome to impeach any enterprise than ...
— Sir Francis Drake Revived • Philip Nichols
... he began again his aimless tour of the place, ranging the four walls like a wild creature dulled to insanity by long imprisonment—passing backward, forward, to and fro, across, around his footsteps timing the dreadful monotone of his heart, his pulse ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... sentimentally, while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once ...
— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut
... people had collected in groups to watch her dancing, the flattering speeches she had heard, the dazzling hopes which had been raised, seemed a little unreal, as if, after all, they could have been only dreams. This was particularly so, of course, when life had dulled for a while and the atmosphere of unpaid bills became heavy at home. It was so to-day, because the girl had received a long, anxious letter from her mother, in which much was said of the importance of an early preparation for the presentation ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... want of skill than to a defect of Nature. But in this position, or mode of placing, I deem the virtues of this stone to be properly conserved, and I believe that in other positions or parts of the sky its virtue is dulled, rather than preserved. By means of this instrument at all events you will be relieved from every kind of clock (horologium), for by it you will be able to know the Ascendant at whatever hour you will, and all other dispositions of the ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... reading and living was quite the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience give her after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance, like that of a drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face and wondered how it would look in twenty years' time, when the eyes had dulled, and the forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles which seem to show that the middle-aged are facing something hard which the young do not see? What would the hard thing be for them, he wondered? Then his thoughts turned ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... sitting in was the one in which John the Crooked (as he was pleased to call himself in his facetious days) used to sit and think out his villainies or issue his odious orders. At this moment I thought I saw the ghosts of all the Mauprats passing before me, with their bloody hands and their eyes dulled with wine. I got up and was about to yield to the horror I felt by taking to flight, when suddenly I saw a figure rise up in front of me, so distinct, so recognisable, so different in its vivid reality from the chimeras that had just besieged me, that I fell back in ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... was suffering a reaction, and for a moment it dulled the edge of her wits), "but I know the Good Samaritan, an' they know ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Boy a moment, and then turned his back. The Boy glanced up conscience-stricken, but still only half alive, dulled by the weight of a crushing weariness. The Colonel presently bent over the fire and was about to lift off the turbulently boiling pot. The Boy sprang to his feet, ready to shout, "You do your work, and keep your hands off mine," ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... most original effusions; yet the wave of Platonism that passed over Alexandria could not but quicken even the conservative mind of the Jew. Greek thought blended with echoes of the past, though in dulled form. Still a line had to be drawn in the national literature; and it was well drawn on the whole. The feeling existed that the collection must be closed with works of a certain period and a certain character; and it was ...
— The Canon of the Bible • Samuel Davidson
... look faded from Jim's eye and the blaze of wrath dulled to a gray contempt. She was afraid that he might call her what she had once overheard Pet Bettany call her—"A common little mucker." That sort of contempt seared like ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... behind his opera-glass, fixing his attention on the least details of the stage arrangements, giving a three-quarters view of his back to the house, but unable to escape the scandalous observation of which he was the victim and which made his ears buzz, his temples beat, the dulled lenses of his opera-glass become full of those whirling multi-coloured circles which are the first ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... possession of his own. I laid the bundle of splints and rolls of linen down on the table with a professional air, while I was inwardly execrating my father's negligence. I emptied the portmanteau in the hope of finding some small phial or box. Any opiate would have been welcome to me, that would have dulled the overwrought nerves of the girl in the room within. But the practice of using any thing of the kind was not in favor with us generally in the Channel Islands, and my father had probably concluded that a Sark woman would not consent to use them. ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... conduct has hitherto been above reproach, will stoop and pick up out of the gutter a blighted and tarnished reputation and protect and defend it against all slights, and devote his life to the attempt to restore lustre to the unclean thing dulled by the touch of many fingers. In her days of prosperity Commander de Jars and the king's treasurer had both fluttered round Mademoiselle de Guerchi, and neither had fluttered in vain. Short as was the period necessary to overcome ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - LA CONSTANTIN—1660 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... promise Hal Randall bestowed his still dulled and half-stunned nephew carefully on the pallet provided by the care of the purveyors. Stephen slept dreamily at first, then soundly, and woke at the sound of the bells of Gravelines to the sense that a great crisis in his life was over, a strange wild dream of evil dispelled, ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... aberrations; an ear might be curving around a lip or an eye leering strangely in the middle of a chin. But there were ways of looking into the glass which practice had discovered, and usage had long ago dulled the terrors of its vagaries. Looking into this glass Mrs. Makebelieve would comment minutely upon the two faces therein, and, pointing to her own triumphantly genuine nose and the fact that her husband's nose had been of quite discernible proportions, she would seek in labyrinths ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... with drooping wings waiting for a return of appetite to recommence their banquet; others were so gorged, that they could not walk away. With their wings trailing in the mud, and their beaks separated, as if gasping for breath, their brilliant eye dulled from repletion—there they remained, emitting an effluvium so offensive that the numerous skeletons, and the mingled remains of mortality, were pleasing compared to such disgusting specimens ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... him that she knew as well as he. In the same second, however, a thought shot through her brain, changing her whole king. Her pale face glowed, her dulled eyes shot fire, and the fingers with which she held Muller's hand tightly clasped, ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... hopeless mission, from the small, redbrick lamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantage in front of the shed which enclosed the booking office, looked up and down the lifeless row of closed and streaming windows, with an expectancy dulled by daily disappointment, for the passengers who seldom alighted. On this occasion no records were broken. A solitary young man stepped out on to the wet and flinty platform, handed over the half of a third-class return ticket from London, passed ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... flurry of action, and two of the dancers stumbled and collapsed, their partner-opponents whirling away to pair off again, describe the elaborate pre-combat ritual, and abruptly set to, dulled sabres clashing—and two more Yill were down, stunned. It ...
— The Yillian Way • John Keith Laumer
... it, dulled into a moan, came through Rosbride bridge, and Thady, who had grown very drowsy, thought to himself that the wind was getting up, and that they couldn't have done better than stop where they were, instead of to be setting off tramping ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... and lines of your composition seen under the influence of the enthusiasm that has inspired the work. This will be of great value afterwards in freshening your memory when in the labour of the work the original impulse gets dulled. It is seldom that the vitality of this first sketch is surpassed by the completed work, and often, alas! it is far ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... they can think of nothing but strong food.' Believe me, then, the love which a ballet girl inspires is very delusive; in her we find, under an appearance of an artificial springtime, a soil which is cold as well as greedy, and senses which are utterly dulled. The Calabrian doctors prescribed the dance as a remedy for the hysteric affections which are common among the women of their country; and the Arabs use a somewhat similar recipe for the highbred mares, whose too lively ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... being at the hands of a nameless yet surely Evil Thing? Her love for Ian was so great that his sufferings were more to her than her own, and in the space of those two years she saw that on him, too, sorrow had set its mark. The glow of his good looks and the brilliancy of his mind were alike dulled. It was not only that his shoulders were bent, his hair thinned and touched with gray, but his whole appearance, once so individual, was growing merely typical; that of the middle-aged Academic, absorbed in the cares of his profession. His real work was not merely at a stand-still, ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... cost, his lids drooped and lifted, drooped and lifted, drooped and were dragged open by sheer will-power. Each time it was more difficult. Just as the water laps inexorably at length over the face of an exhausted swimmer, so these waves of sleep, smothering, clutching, dulled his senses and strove to wrap him in ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... of getting away had dulled his ears to other sounds, for normally he could not have failed to hear the chuff-chuff of the approaching Ford. As he swung into the saddle he saw it out of the corner of his eye and ducked. The vision of two men—an excited yell and ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... short but exactly six feet high. We in Ireland thought as do the plays and ballads, not understanding that, from the first moment wherein nature foresaw the birth of Bastien-Lepage, she has only granted great creative power to men whose faces are contorted with extravagance or curiosity or dulled with some ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... Nothing. So far as he was concerned, the world had come to an end. Sporting instinct; probably that was it; couldn't make up his mind to shuffle off this mortal coil until he had beaten his enemies. English university education had dulled the bite of his natural fatalism. To carry on for the sport of it; not to accept fate but ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... not hear the door open again, for the torturing pain that shot through him dulled all his other senses. He wished that he might faint away, even for a moment, but his nerves were too sound for that. He was recalled to outer things by feeling a hand laid gently on his leg, and immediately afterwards he heard a man's voice, in a quietly gruff tone that scarcely rose ...
— Marietta - A Maid of Venice • F. Marion Crawford
... foreign-looking face was just the fitting contrast to the Lisles' fair, clear features. The morbid depression of a couple of months earlier had passed, and left him far more like the Percival of Brackenhill. Poverty surrounded the friends and dulled their lives, but as yet it was only a burden, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... table and washed the dishes with a celerity bewildering to the slow brain dulled by the marline spike. He swabbed up the galley under Neb's gruff direction; he fed the chickens and milked the cow. For a brief space in two summers of his early life, Dan had been borne off by an Angel Guardian Society to its Fresh Air Home, a plain, old-fashioned farmhouse ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... caught an old tub, its shininess dulled, its hull faintly scarred. Just such a ship, he thought with a thrill, as the one on which Comets Carter had been shanghaied on that momentous occasion ...
— Runaway • William Morrison
... roar the minarets exploded almost simultaneously, and the sparks shot up to mingle with the dulled stars overhead. The Union League and Pacific Union clubs next shone red with the fire that ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... clutched securely in one hand, she broke upon that dignitary's startled, near-sighted vision like a young whirl-wind of linen and starch and flapping brown paper. Breathlessly, without prelude or preamble, she hurled her grievance into the older woman's grievance-dulled ears. ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... job, but there's something left behind; I take up fear with my chisel, fear lies 'twixt me and my plane, And I wake in the merry morning to a new unwonted pain. That's fear: I shall live it down—and many a thing besides Till I win the poor dulled heart which the workman's jacket hides. Were it not for the Hope of Hopes I know my journey's end, And would wish I had ne'er been born ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... snatches of books he had read and one or two scientific reports of such cases. He climbed into bed and blew out his candle. His drowsiness thickened. In his dulled mind one recollection remained—the picture of Howells coldly challenging him with his level smile to make a secret entrance of the old bedroom in a murderous effort to escape the penalty of the earlier crime. And Howells had been right. ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... with a touch of mockery in it flitted over her face as she replied: "Oh, must I tell you that there are things you cannot do? Look, Abel," and she touched the slight garment she wore, thinner now than at first, and dulled by long exposure to ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... bowling-alley, the fish-stew and the fruit-garden. At every step some fresh surprise arrested Odo; but the terrible vision of that other garden planted with the dead bodies of the Innocents robbed the spectacle of its brightness, dulled the plumage of the birds behind their gilt wires and cast a deeper shade over the beech-grove, where figures of goat-faced men lurked balefully in the twilight. Odo was glad when they left the blackness of this ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... that it was startling to see a frivolous cigarette amid the reverend mane. The scent of fried fish and decaying bits of kosher meat, and hallways as damnably rotten of floor as they were profitable to New York's nicest circles. The tall gloom of six-story tenements that made a prison wall of dulled yellow, bristling with bedding-piled fire-escapes and the curious heads of frowzy women. A potpourri of Russian signs, Yiddish newspapers, synagogues with six-pointed gilt stars, bakeries with piles of rye bread crawling with caraway-seeds, shops for renting wedding ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... delight is, however, somewhat dulled by the discovery that she is the lady whom fate has ordained that you shall take in to dinner—a matter of which you were sublimely unconscious owing to the fact that you had entirely forgotten her name. As the couples pair off to march to the dining room and ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he felt a sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer sensation in the eyes, and sickness. The sun had touched him too affectionately. The next three days were passed in semi-darkness, and a dulled, aching indifference to all except the feel of ice on his forehead and his mother's smile. She never moved from his room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance, which seemed to Jon angelic. But there were moments when he was extremely ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... our Pleasaunce." And they would have stayed for hours, but there was one other spot that had a fascination for the General neither years nor wars had dulled, and he, who was the most matter-of-fact and romantic of men, must see and show it to ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... side with hinges, and catching with hooks and eyes; epauliers, or shoulder-plates; arm-plates and leg-pieces; and a bascinet, or open-faced helmet. A great triangular shield covered with leather and studded with bosses of iron, and a heavy broadsword, pointed and dulled at the edges, completed ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... more that strange earth shudder. It seemed to him that it was less distinct here than it had been further back in the mine. But of this he could not be sure. It might easily be that the slight sounds and the sensations of light and air here dulled his sensibilities, making it harder for him ...
— Panther Eye • Roy J. Snell
... King Sugriva's ear was dulled, By love and wine and languor lulled, Nor did the words that Angad spake The slumberer from his trance awake. But soon as Raghu's son came nigh The startled Vanars raised a cry, And strove to win his grace, while ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... will, his eyes closed, and his lips refused to obey his desire to protest. Fatigue dulled his thoughts. But for a moment, he went on pondering. Somebody from the future—this could never be the past—had somehow pulled him out just ahead of the accident, apparently; or else he'd been deep frozen ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... night wore on; midnight came and the elemental uproar was at its height. Still she lay there all in a heap, suffering in a dulled, miserable way that was worse than sharpest pain. She lay there stunned, overwhelmed, not caring if ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... of the mist of years long dead—the most of them are full-eyed as the dandelion that from dawn to shade has steeped itself in sunlight. Here and there in their ranks, however, moves a forlorn one who is blind—blind in the sense of the dulled window-pane on which the pelting raindrops have mingled and run down, obscuring sunshine and the circling birds, happy fields, and storied garden; blind with the spatter of a misery uncomprehended, unanalysed, only felt as something corporeal in ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... minerals are, of course, missing from this list, and most of the minerals from 5 down to 1 are not gem minerals at all. Few gem materials are of less hardness than 7, for any mineral less hard than quartz (7) will inevitably be worn and dulled in time by the ordinary road dust, which contains ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... and relieve each other. The maintenance of our cause rests on the sentiments of the people. Letters from the camp, complaining of inequality and harshness in the treatment of the men, have already dulled the enthusiasm which filled our ranks with men who by birth, fortune, education, and social position were the equals of any officer in the land. The spirit of our military law is manifested in the fact that the State organization ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... a torpid face lighted now by a speciously amiable expression. The carpets had dulled his steps and the preoccupation of the two sisters had kept them from noticing the noise of his carriage-wheels on entering the court-yard. The countess, in whom the habits of social life and the ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... But rather quietly to eat in hall, And to devise deeds worthy. Whether I Be brave and strong, or whether I be not, Battle, wherein a man's true might is seen, Shall prove to thee. Now would I rest, nor drink The long night through. The battle-eager spirit By measureless wine and lack of sleep is dulled." ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... resumed Mr. Titus, "after we had bored for a considerable distance into the mountain, a mass of volcanic rock which is so hard that our best diamond drills are dulled in a short time, and the explosives we use merely shatter the face of the cutting, and give us hardly any ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton
... something—mercifully. Yes, the supreme humiliation that Tante had prepared for her was frustrated. And she had been strangely hard and harsh to Tante and in return Tante had been piteous yet unmoving. Her heart was dulled towards Tante. She felt that she saw her from a ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... punkahs, he said: "There is force in what you say. It would be an unpleasant look-out for us here and in many parts of the world if we could not place reliance on the effect of uniform; but"—and the amused look came again to his eyes— "we somehow get dulled to the virtues of Indian troops and Somauli policemen. We can't ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... blaze. Donald, on his knees, with hands outspread like a worshiper in adoration before his god—as In truth he was!—felt the penetrant vibrations of the fire with an inexpressible languor of bliss. This was the last match—the end! But what matter? The lethargy of utter exhaustion dulled familiar suffering. The obsession of the match still held its mastery, and its expression was the hot flame that breathed on him. Donald had no thought of death now, though vaguely he knew that he ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... hundred and fifty years is over. Frenchman, Russian, Englishman, what opiate's drowsy charms dulled your eager eyes so long here? Thousands of miles of virgin lands, countless millions of treasures, royal forests and hills yet to grow under harvest of olive and vine—all this the mole-like eyes of the olden ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... the whizzing bullets, the constant nerve-racking crashing and roaring overhead, the deafening cracking of splitting iron everywhere—that is war. And accompanying it all the hopeless sensation that this will never, never stop, that it will go on like this forever, until one's thoughts are dulled by some terrible, cruel, incomprehensible, demoralizing force. Those bounding puffs of smoke everywhere on the ground, rifle shots which have been aimed too short and every one of which— That abominable sharp singing as of a swarm of mosquitoes, buzz, buzz, like the buzzing ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... with all thy past, Till these last years that make the sea so wide; Think not the jar of battle's trumpet-blast Has dulled our aching sense to joyous pride In every noble word thy sons bequeathed The ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... course she really wished to pursue. By the time she gained the privacy of her own room that night, she felt exhausted by the contradictions of her own beaten heart and she sat down again in the hard chair, too dulled to think. ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... excitement dulled to a matter-of-fact hungriness, she trotted beside him to a restaurant, one of the string of Vance eating-places, a food-mill which tried to achieve originality by the use of imitation rafters, a plate-rack aligned with landscape plates, and varnished ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... and flung themselves down, and then began a half-swimming, half-crawling progress behind bits of tree-fern stump, or merely pushing walls of the jellylike mud before them. The white light expanded and grew huge—but it dulled as it expanded, and presently seemed no hotter than molten steel, and later still it was no more than a dull-red heat, ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... road. As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling
... feelings had been dulled into complete indifference. But I found it as trying as ever to be on deck. The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one's hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance. ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... and then I used to try to shape a tale which in a figure might leave an arresting or a restraining thought in their minds; or even touch with a light of romance some of the knightly virtues which are apt to be dulled into the aspect ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... either to her or to that which withholds from joining in her ecstasy. Bates was a man sensitive to many forces, the response to which within him was not openly acknowledged to himself. He was familiar with the magnificence of sunsets in this region, but his mind was not dulled to the marvel of the coloured glory in which the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... indifference of a man accustomed to danger, his unassuming manner, his frank ways—everything about him awakened her interest. She had supposed that in two years the very faculty of being interested by a man would be dulled if not destroyed; she found to her annoyance that though she had seen Mr. Juxon only twice she could not put him out of her thoughts. She was, moreover, a nervous, almost morbid, woman, and the natural result of trying to forget his existence ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them. The Sabbath calm, so heavy that an axe could hardly have dispelled it, filled the curving streets and the square gardens like an invisible fog—a fog that dulled the brain and weighed down the eyelids and made the grim walls of the Treadwell tobacco factory look as if they were rising out of a dream. Into this dream, under the thick boughs of mulberry trees, there passed presently a thin file of people, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... what she said must have struck his dulled mind, for the look of savage ferocity quickly died from his face, leaving it once more pale with abject fear. He must have realised that his own unreasoning cowardice had placed him entirely in ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the past, only trying to hold a position, they get dulled. They turn half zombie. Even the Snakes. Even our people. Besides, she almost did catch on, twice when ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of mirth in his throat once more, stood there, dripping, dishevelled, and laughing. For four years he had missed the life he had been bred to; he had missed even what he despised in it, and his life at moments had become a hell of isolation. Time dulled the edges of his loneliness; solitude, if it hurts, sometimes cures too. But he was not yet cured of longing for that self-forbidden city in the North. He desired it—he desired the arid wilderness of its treeless streets, its incessant ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... certain extent the Hotel Magnificent had dulled the pain. At any rate, the service and cooking there had done much to take his mind off it. His heart still ached, but he felt equal to going to London and seeing his father, which of course he ought to have done seven ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... witness may be dulled by neglect of duty, by sloth in prayer, by inattention to the Bible, by indefinite, hesitating testimony, and by carelessness, when we should be careful to walk soberly and steadfastly ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... dulled the face of Kitty gave way to a look of understanding and a smile as she remembered having ordered him to get hot water, but the amazement on the faces of Mr. Fenelby and his wife remained as ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... previously adhering to it, which is made to adhere more closely by the action of the heat, or from matter communicated from the flame of the lamp, or from the air itself. It often happens that a polished plate of platina, when heated by the spirit-lamp and a blowpipe, becomes dulled and clouded on its surface by something either formed or deposited there; and this, and much less than this, is sufficient to prevent it from exhibiting the curious power now under consideration (634. 636.). Platina also has been said to combine with ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... except at night, and kept my vow; but the consequence was, that I looked forward to the night, and waited for it with such eagerness that the day seemed to exist only for the sake of the evening, when I might hope at least for rest. For the wine as wine I cared nothing; anything that would have dulled my senses would have done ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... a great comfort to a person to know exactly how to feel and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for surprise and little for emotion. O ye belles of Newport and of Bar Harbor, in your correct and conventional agreement of what is proper and agreeable, are you wasting your sweet lives by rule? Is your ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Fremantle. A week later H.M.S. Minotaur passed down the lines between the ships, and soon after disappeared over the eastern horizon. The fleet had been sailing with carefully screened lights, and now precautions were to be doubled, no dynamos to be run, and navigation lights to be further dulled by several thicknesses of signal flags across the glass. Various small happenings left the troops with a sort of impression that there might be something in the wind. When, therefore, early one tropic morning the three remaining men-o'-war moved ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... be rewarded there in the blackness beneath the trees. The pace grew faster. Men glanced at their neighbours now and then as well as ahead, and Breckenridge felt the silence grow oppressive as the bluff rose higher. The snow dulled the beat of hoofs, and the flitting figures that rode with him passed on almost as noiselessly as the long black shadows that followed them. His heart beat faster than usual when, as they reached the ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... financial aid temporarily, and, either at the request of friends or because the individual has something he wishes to purchase and has not the patience to wait, he borrows from the firm by means of "the ticket in the drawer" plan. He repeats the operation frequently until his conscience is dulled, and he gets the habit. Some day he wakes up to find he has several tickets in the drawer, and resorts to extreme measures, trying to beat the races, or to win money by gambling on ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... Loch Lomond"; with greeting and banter from the Ermine, which was steaming out with us on her voyage to Helles; and with all these things under an overcast sky that broke frequently into rain, we left Lemnos, the harbour and the hills, going out through a dulled sunset. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... of the shrines we made Thro' centuries of forgotten tears ... We knew not where their scorn had laid Our Master. Twice a thousand years Had dulled the uncapricious Sun. Manifold worlds ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... than ever convinced of her wisdom in choice of garb when in early morning I glimpsed her with the two other women at the Adams fire; for, bright-haired and small, she had been sorrily dulled by the plain ill-fitting waist and long shapeless skirt in one garment, as adopted by the feminine contingent of the train. In her particular case these were worse fitting and longer than common—an artifice that certainly snuffed ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... ear dull, expression obliterated! I flung myself in a passion of grief across the coffin. I kissed the waxen face and hands a thousand times and bathed them with scalding tears, then stooping down to the dulled ear I whispered: ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... down and turned him over on his chest. Then, with great difficulty, she got him up on to his feet; she took him by the wrists and, stooping again, swung him on to her shoulder. These acts, requiring attention and drawing on all her energy, dulled the pain of her knowledge. When she stood up with him she saw John and McClane coming to her. She lowered her man gently back on to ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair |
