He knew that in the daily attrition and conventional intimacies of the table, the drawing-room, or the promenade, the cloak covering his resentful antipathy, his moral perversities, his thinly veiled impatience, was worn to such thin shreds that eyes keen as Jack's must see and know him as he was.

It was a theatre where free farcical pieces were produced, and on its walls were posted huge portraits of its "star," a carroty wench with a long flat figure, destitute of all womanliness, and seemingly symbolical of perversity.

To a considerable element of the town it seemed to be mere innate perversity.

The lad amuses me, and you can't deny you like to nurse sick heroes," was all the answer she got, as the major, with true masculine perversity, put his head out of the window and hailed Casimer as he was passing with a bow.

With that queer perversity of human nerves, he kept biting his sore teeth together as he walked along.

In the midst of lower passions let loose, through banded parties, imperative mandates, and factitious organizations, which no longer leave the smallest outlet for the flight of the least independent wish, the perversities of corrupt and misled democracy have full scope.

But the truth is, that Mr. Wordsworth, with all his perversities, is a person of great powers; and has frequently a force in his moral declamations, and a tenderness in his pathetic narratives, which neither his prolixity nor his affectation can altogether deprive of their effect.

I had been told that the right waythe one followed by all sensible peopleof seeing the gorge from Sainte-Enimie to Le Rozier was to come down the stream in a boat; but circumstances, or my own perversity, had led me once more to do the thing that was considered wrong.

To the several perversities of the day a man should always oppose only the great masses of universal history.

But by aid of those strange perversities of nature, he had by this time honestly and sincerely got to regard all their subsequent employments of it merely as efforts on his part to make right an original wrong.

Sometimes in the French café outside the walls, among the officers of the garrison, a bantering perversity drove him on to chant the old glories of Islam, the poets of Andalusia, and the bombastic histories of the saints; and in the midst of it, his face pink with the Frenchmen's wine and his own bitter, half-frightened mockery, he would break off suddenly, "Voilà, Messieurs!

After crossing the river, our path, with the perversity of all Spanish roads, instead of following up the valley of the stream, diverged widely to the right through a cluster or knot of hills, in which we were involved until we reached a rapid stream called Rio Guanupalapa, flowing through a narrow gorge, over a wild mass of stones and boulders.

And you, Gertrude, what necessity can there be in your troubling yourself to amuse people whom you meet every day of your life, and who, from the vulgar perversity of society, value you in exact proportion as you neglect them?' 'Yes, but to-day I must be attentive; for Henry, with his usual thoughtlessness, has asked this new bishop to dine with us.'

He was in one of those dark humours of which there was a latent spring in his nature, but which in old days had been kept in check by his simple life, his inexperienced mind, and the general kindness that greeted him, and which nothing but the caprice and perversity of his mother could occasionally develope.

He would never see that the victory lies with the appreciator of any personality, because, if you happen to appreciate a figure whom he himself dislikes, you are proclaimed to be guilty of perversity and bad taste.

And to this end the masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse.

It may be that I was afraid that, with the perversity of inanimate things, it had the laugh on me.

But the moral thought itself in Tacitus mostly belongs less to the practical wisdom of life, than to sombre poetic indignation, like that of Dante, against the perversities of men and the blindness of fortune.

The one is the source of a thousand virtues; the other is that of nearly all vices and all perversities.

A more valid accusation touches the many verbal perversities, in which a poet has less right than another to indulge.

Such, and even worse, vagaries and perversities, are to be found in the innumerable pictures of this favourite subject, which inundated the churches between 1640 and 1720.

He abruptly dismissed the intimate "thou," with his usual American perversity.

"The manifold changes and even confusions and perversities, which manifest themselves in the long course of the threads of its history, ultimately tend to the solution of this great problem.

What wicked perversity made you fix upon me who, even if I had not belonged to any one else, could never, never have fancied you!" "Is that true?" he says, in a harsh, rough whisper; "are you sure that you are not deceiving yourself?

And he remained saddened, haunted by the symbols of perversities and superhuman loves, of divine stuprations brought to end without abandonment and without hope.