His voice lost its curtness as he turned to the girl.

Though he could not avoid seeing the mischievous character of many of the resolutions thus tumultuously passed, and though his royal assent to them was asked in language unceremonious and almost peremptory in its curtness, Louis could not bring himself, or perhaps did not venture, to refuse his sanction to them.

In an age when indolence or the study of French models has reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point, Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a predicate and six without danger of an overset.

She told him, with peculiar curtness, how she had seen him from her window, and how she wished to ask him an important question.

"I don't know," said Hilda, with curtness.

Taciturnity N. silence, muteness, obmutescence^; taciturnity, pauciloquy^, costiveness^, curtness; reserve, reticence &c (concealment) 528.

Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated naïveté as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly in reserve.

" G. refused with some curtness.

"Well, I guess I don't need anybody to do that: I can do it myself," she said, with the good-humoured curtness that was the habitual note of intercourse with the Spraggs.

I haven't received any additional instructions from her," he said, with none of the curtness of tone that his stiff legal vocabulary implied.

" "What 's the trouble?" asked the lawyer, with business-like curtness, for he did not scent much of a fee.

" It was not the insulting curtness of one who wishes to be left in peace, but simply a statement of bald fact.

"There is one other thing," Hewitt went on, disregarding the other's curtness, "that I should like to know: There are two windows directly below that of the room occupied yesterday by Mrs. Cazenoveone on each floor.

Where these compressed and cultivated a style which was staccato and epigrammatic, huddling all the traits of their subject in short sharp sentences that follow each other with all the brevity and curtness of items in a prescription, Addison and Steele observed a more artistic plan.

"I certainly do refuse to fall into any such clumsy trap as you have been trying to bait for me, Mr. Meigs," said David Kent, dropping back into his former curtness.

To the small crowd, however, this was the extreme of brutal curtness.

They look so strangely beside the brisk, dapper curtnesses in which metropolitan journals transact their daily squabbles!

" Curtness in letter-writing does not necessarily indicate oddity.

With military curtness Kincaid was addressing the score or so of new cannoneers: "Corporal Valcour, this squadno, keep your partners, but others please stand to the right and leftthese men are under your command.

"The Princess des Ursins is about to return to Spain," she said; "if I do not take her in hand, if I do not repair by my attentions the coldness of the Duchess of Burgundy, the indifference of the king and the curtness of the other princes, she will go away displeased with our court, and it is expedient that she should praise it, and speak well of it in Spain.

To deny my request was simply one of his ill-advised whims, and his refusal was given with customary curtness and contempt.

Its dryness and negative curtness were provoking.

..." "I was laboring under the idea, my wench, that you were doing all that because you cared for me," he retorted with almost brutal curtness, "and because you had the desire to become the Princess d'Orléans; that desire is now gratified and ..." He had not really meant to be unkind.

There is an occasional curtness about Cambridge men that is hard but not impossible to reconcile with good feeling.