If, after all, they did less mischief than Lucifer had expected from them, the cause was their entire bewilderment by what had passed, and their utter inability to penetrate the policy of Gerbert, who henceforth devoted himself even with ostentation to good works.

But her blend of qualities, no matter how strong in itself, was nullified by just one lack: the total inability of the Prussian mind to understand the mind of the world exterior to Germany.

To argue that our fleet in the Mediterranean was not of strength sufficient to oppose their passage, is a subterfuge to which they can only be driven by the necessity of making some apology, and an absolute inability to produce any which will not immediately be discovered to be groundless.

From the very first she had been perplexed, and indeed saddened, by her failure, her sheer inability, to react emotionally to their alleged relationship.

It is conscious inability, or the sense of repeated failures, that prevents us from undertaking, or deters us from the prosecution of any work."

Monty, in his usual airy way, tried to make the best of the situation and draw attention away from his evident inability to cope with the situation.

She was beginning to see that he felt her constitutional inability to understand anything about money as the deepest difference between them.

Grace now turned towards me, releasing her hold of Lucy's neck, from pure inability to sustain it; and she fastened her serene blue eyes on my countenance, whence they never deviated while she breathed.

He broke down and wept out upon the shoulder of Potts his hopeless inability to comply with that outrageous request.

If that was her intentionand nothing is more probable; for women are very daring, though they are timidshe was stopped, it is most likely, by that curious inability to move a step farther which we have all experienced.

We moderns have not only no such rule, but profess inability to comprehend its rationale.

On other occasions he saw big scorpions and big hairy spiders trying to escape in the same way, and showing the same helpless inability to injure their ravenous foes, or to defend themselves.

One thing protected while it baffled himthe entire inability of Adeliza to understand what he meant.

The Epistle to the Romans surveyed the moral failure of the world; St. Paul looked on the chasm between knowledge and action, the "unbridged gulf, this incredible inability of man to do what was right, with profound wonder"; but in the face of this hopeless spectacle he dared to prophesy the moral elevation which we have witnessed, and the power to which he looked to bring it about was the Christian doctrines.

For my own part I became frankly tired of the pecuniary crises of the Wyndhams and of their incurable inability to tell the truth.

Union Mills, who had been for some time sitting placidly on the threshold with one leg exposed to the rain, from a sheer indolent inability to change his position, finally withdrew that weather-beaten member, and stood up.

Poor Graham, distracted by her innocent inability to make up her mind to marry him!

The one thing that annoyed him was the necessity of hiding his joyhis inability to make his good fortune public, so that all his admirers might learn of it.

In cases of shoulder lameness the gait alone should be sufficient to render liability of error small, for with nearly every case there is a manifest inability to 'get the limb forward', and this is best seen at a side view when the animal is trotting past the observer.

Of course she is pictured as the tallest of women, and it is in regard to the question of stature that the Greeks once more betray their ultra-masculine inability to appreciate true femininity; as, for example, in the stupid remark of Aristotle (Eth.

Some say that water-fowl avoid the place when able to escape, but that the ice on the shores of the river above often prevents them from obtaining food, and that they are carried down from mere inability to fly; while others assert that, they are sometimes seen voluntarily riding among the rapids, and, after descending half-way down the cataract, taking wing, and returning to repeat their dangerous amusement.

A pretty woman may fan the flame of distant adorers by harassing them, but if she lets one of them make her his wife, the point of view from which he will look at her poutings and tossings and mysterious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered.

"You oughtn't to let yourself get into a state like this," said Mac, thinking ruefully of these strangers' obvious inability to travel for a day or two, and of the Christmas dinner, to which Benham alone had been bidden, by a great stretch of hospitality.

He heard a suppressed scream of fear from his wife, and the next moment she came rushing into the room; yet the never a word she uttered, and her lips were so white and dry that you might have supposed that her silence was the result of organic inability.

The first misery of loneliness takes the form of a restless inability to concentrate.