Generals cannot draw their rigid bows with ease; Though coats of mail are worn, the officers still freeze.
" An odd quiver passed through the tall, rigid form.
The big canopied bed, jutting out from the wall into the middle of the floor, was high and rigid and curtained also with dark draperies.
The loss of one hundred dollars a year is a very trifling matter, but it made all the difference between comfort and self-denial to the two old spinsters Their manner of life had been so rigid and careful that it was difficult to economize any further, and the blow had fallen just when it was most inconvenient, for Rebecca's school and boarding expenses, small as they were, had to be paid promptly and in cash.
Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor, in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance.
For a moment his rigid countenance relaxed with a quiver of content: quickly bent up again, however, he went on,— "Vite à l'ouvrage!
But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement.
" She glanced at them, and then looked up at us with the set, rigid face of a desperate woman.
His profile was half turned towards me, and his face seemed to be rigid with expectation as he stared out into the blackness of the moor.
" And when they turned away he stood and looked after them in a dazed kind of way, and there was still a mist in his eyes, and a lump in his throat, as he watched the gallant little figure marching gayly along by the side of its tall, rigid escort.
He knew very little about children, though he had seen plenty of them in England—fine, handsome, rosy girls and boys, who were strictly taken care of by their tutors and governesses, and who were sometimes shy, and sometimes a trifle boisterous, but never very interesting to a ceremonious, rigid old lawyer.
A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission of anything that was becoming, or that belonged to that eternal fitness of things which was plainly indicated in the practice of the most substantial parishioners, and in the family traditions,—such as obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigid honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils, the hoarding of coins likely to disappear from the currency, the production of first-rate commodities for the market, a
"They'll make a shift to pay everything, Bessy," he said, "and yet leave you your furniture; and your sisters'll do something for you—and Tom'll grow up—though what he's to be I don't know—I've done what I could—I've given him a eddication—and there's the little wench, she'll get married—but it's a poor tale——" The sanative effect of the strong vibration was exhausted, and with the last words the poor man fell again, rigid and insensible.
He tightened his arm almost convulsively round Maggie as she sobbed, but his face looked rigid and tearless, his eyes blank,—as if a black curtain of cloud had suddenly fallen on his path.
Under these average boyish physiognomies that she seems to turn off by the gross, she conceals some of her most rigid, inflexible purposes, some of her most unmodifiable characters; and the dark-eyed, demonstrative, rebellious girl may after all turn out to be a passive being compared with this pink-and-white bit of masculinity with the indeterminate features.
That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the rigid outline with which acts present themselves to onlookers.
Casaubon would have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon.
Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.
In chuckling over the vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand, he inevitably mingled his consciousness with that livid stagnant presence, and so far as he was preoccupied with a future life, it was with one of gratification inside his coffin.
He was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to others.
