Besides, I've a penchant for failures.

He had a penchant for interesting situations, and in France today anything may happen.

"I have a penchant for mysteries.

The penchant for them had already been deadened, some time before her marriage, by reading the Gospel, which she found "so beautiful," and in which she discerned a character of truth which disgusted her with all other books.

The Thames tunnel is too amphibious an affair to be included in the number; but the ship canal project, the bridge-building mania, and the penchant for working mines by steam, evidently belong to them.

And furthermore, certain anecdotes told in the first section, particularly in the first eighty pages, are such stories as would have appealed to Defoe's penchant for the uncanny, and might well have been selected by him.

Brown is an individual with a sense of humor and a Mark Twain penchant for ten-pfennig cigars.

" Like most close-knit, centripetal communities, we have a fatal penchant for nicknames in Our Square.

She had distinguished me very favorably, and I was vain enough to suppose she honored me by some jealousy of my penchant for the signorina.

Finally, Mr. ARTHUR HATHERTON, as Lob, the host of the party, a kind of hoary old Puck who had a penchant for filling his house every Midsummer Eve with people who wanted a Second Chance, interpreted Sir JAMES'S whimsical fancy to the very top of freakishness.

As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them.

By a curious law of contrariety the woman with a broad, heavy chin seems to have an ungovernable penchant for trig little round bonnets, or trim turbans with perky aigrettes, like that in sketch No. 22.

In the same year we find him in London, brought out once more under the "special patronage" of Dean Swift, who had quite a penchant for Parnell, and who wished, through his side, to mortify certain persons in Ireland, who did not appreciate, he says, the Archdeacon; and who, we suspect, besides, did not thoroughly appreciate the Dean.

He especially had been impressed by the numbers of corks that flew in the house and on the green; and when I invited him to a bottle of champagne, he made hissing sounds and a plop to indicate that Rui had a penchant for that kind of wine.

If I yield to my penchant for her, and become her husband, instead of being a tender lover, of which she is so worthy, I should be a tyrant, whose frenzy would render her more miserable than myself.

But the epistle, instead of describing Mr. L as an artist, merely designated him "an honest bonnet-maker," who had a penchant for lionizing, and who desired to be introduced to Dr. Southey in "the way of business."

He came across as a very friendly person with a benign face covered with a lot of hair, mostly black; a very hearty laugh and a penchant for practical jokes.

"If François is fond of flowers, M. Perrin has the same penchant for hydraulics and the camera obscura; he draws, he makes jets from the Seine, by an ingenious piece of machinery of his own invention; while he was retouching his syphon, I asked permission to turn over the register, where suicides are ranged in two columns.

Acquaintance with an actor fed Munden's penchant for the stage, but did not fill his pocket.

There they have a penchant for Genevese, parlor-politicians, etc.; therefore, go to England; for I must say, I should be rather ill than well disposed toward you!"

"How would it be," suggests the Lance-Corporal, whose besetting sin is a penchant for emendation, "if we were tae transfair yon stop, and say: 'Reconnoitring patrol reports hostile cavalry scouts.

"For several days," we learn, "she reigns like a Queen in the salon of the Ambassador, out of whose penchant for beautiful women she has no difficulty in wiling a passport that enables her to enter the most exclusive circles of Roman society.

His taste for history was not pronounced, even when treated with the scholarly fidelity and harmonious style of the Duc de Broglie, nor was his penchant for the social and religious questions, even when broached by Henry Cochin, who revealed his true self in a letter where he gave a stirring account of the taking of the veil at the Sacre-Coeur.

Mr. Buchanan's fine denunciations of freebooters had only been fine words for the public ear; secretly he cherished a penchant for freebooters, or rather for the friends of freebooters; and, under those circumstances, to be presented, by his own agent, with the very chief of the freebooters, as a criminal and a scamp, was the most unheard-of simplicity of understanding, and the most astounding literalness of obedience, in any subordinate.

"We have all seen your penchant for Curzon, and his for you, for three days past; but Octavia is as tough as lignum-vitae, I regret to assure you, my dear Miss Harz, and your chance is as blue as your spirits, or the flames of snap-dragon, or Marion's eyes.