As to Henry C-, the next in age and wisdom of our band, he had broken loose from the unyielding
rigidity of his family, solidly rooted, if I remember rightly, in a well-to-do London suburb.
At Halliford I had al- ready come to hate the curate's trick of helpless exclamation, his stupid
rigidity of mind.
There was something severe in his aspect, and a
rigidity throughout his person, characteristics that caused him generally to be taken for a school-master, which vocation, in fact, he had formerly exercised for several years.
They were shown into the drawing-room; it was filled with massive, ugly furniture, and the chairs of the suite were placed round the walls with a forbidding
rigidity. They waited for the headmaster.
But his whole face suddenly bore the solemn
rigidity of the dead, and his expression did not change during the whole time of the drive home.
She tried to replace the arm, but it moved with a frightful
rigidity which could not deceive a sick-nurse.
Archer contemplated with awe the two slender faded figures, seated side by side in a kind of viceregal
rigidity, mouthpieces of some remote ancestral authority which fate compelled them to wield, when they would so much rather have lived in simplicity and seclusion, digging invisible weeds out of the perfect lawns of Skuytercliff, and playing Patience together in the evenings.
The whole apartment was of a
rigidity not to be described in words, but which sent a shiver to the very marrow of Anne's bones.
He sank back again in renewed insensibility and
rigidity, which lasted for many hours, and was only broken by a flickering return of consciousness, in which he took passively everything that was given to him, and seemed to have a sort of infantine satisfaction in Maggie's near presence,--such satisfaction as a baby has when it is returned to the nurse's lap.
I made notes of my patient's pulse and temperature, tested the
rigidity of his muscles, and examined his reflexes.
Ossipon's
rigidity had something business-like, a queer official expression.
Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim
rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand.