The cream wouldn't whip, but remained exasperatingly fluid; the sugar refused to "spin a thread," and obstinately crystallised itself into a hard crust; the almonds persisted in becoming a lumpy mass, instead of a smooth paste; and the gelatine, as Patty despairingly remarked, "acted like all possessed!"

Its progress was exasperatingly slow, owing to the fact that the Mexican Central Railway, which was Huerta's only chosen line of advance, had to be repaired almost rail by rail.

Over all hung the palpitating skies, eternally and exasperatingly blue, a-quiver with light and heat.

But as the time approached for catching a train he became exasperatingly calm and leisured.

"Did I, or did I not understand that I was to have the age on this oil business when there was anything fit to print?" Kent gave the night editor a cigar and was otherwise exasperatingly imperturbable.

We have the captive, jealous in honour, susceptible and exasperatingly Quixotic, doubly enchained by his word and the charms of his fair wardress; the lady's conspicuous ill-treatment of him at the first, a slight mystery, some escapes and counterplots, and on the appointed page the matrimonial finish that hardly the most pessimistic reader can ever have felt as other than assured.

And why, if they keep up with the fashions and wear patent-leathers, do people say, in an exasperatingly astonished tone, "Can that woman write books?"

He is frequently a man of character, but through that character runs this strange, irritating thread of conceit, which blinds our eyes to whatever of real worth may be within, because of his exasperatingly confident exterior.

Why did he look so exasperatingly humble?

Wise Flora, whenever she alluded to their holding of the plighted ones apart, named the scheme his till that cloyed, and then "ours" in a way that made it more richly his, even whenclearly to Madame, dimly to him, exasperatingly to bothher wiles for its successwoven around his cousinbecame purely feminine blandishments for purely feminine ends.

Why, on earth, he wondered, had she gone away and left him with this sweet and good, this quite exasperatingly sweet and good woman who had told him nothing but lies?

One would step to the window and in an exasperatingly in-no-hurry way, say: "Anything for Andrew Jackson, sah?"

It was a windy, chilly, and exasperatingly bright spring morning; the sunshine appeared to prick the traveller all over rather than to warm him.

She was exasperatingly attractive.

But, when one tries to catch him and pin him down on the dissecting-table, he turns out to be exasperatingly elusive.