They found Mary, as usual, deep in the study of thorough-bass and human nature; and had some extracts to admire, and some new observations of
threadbare morality to listen to.
Their position was perhaps the happiest of all positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness ends, and below the line at which the CONVENANCES begin to cramp natural feelings, and the stress of
threadbare modishness makes too little of enough.
Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in
threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans.
He wore the same suit that I had seen him in five years before; it was torn and stained,
threadbare, and it hung upon him loosely, as though it had been made for someone else.
Nevertheless, he in his embroidered clothes, and Samuel Adams in his
threadbare coat, wrought together in the cause of liberty.
No prepossession for the mere antique (and in this case we can imagine no other prepossession) should induce us to dignify with the sacred name of poetry, a series, such as this, of elaborate and
threadbare compliments, stitched, apparently, together, without fancy, without plausibility, and without even an attempt at adaptation.
Levin saw proofs of this in his dress, in the old-fashioned
threadbare coat, obviously not his everyday attire, in his shrewd deep-set eyes, in his idiomatic, fluent Russian, in the imperious tone that had become habitual from long use, and in the resolute gestures of his large, red, sunburnt hands, with an old betrothal ring on the little finger.
That you will remember me only as the little shabby girl you protected with so much tenderness, from whose
threadbare dress you have kept away the rain, and whose wet feet you have dried at your fire.
"Neither at that, nor treble the sum," responded the gaunt, grizzled, and
threadbare Peter Goldthwaite.
``Dog of an unbeliever,'' said an old man, whose
threadbare tunic bore witness to his poverty, as his sword, and dagger, and golden chain intimated his pretensions to rank, ``whelp of a she-wolf !
This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable suf- fering that he worked it over and over again in his mind and set it up in new and varied lights, till he wore it
threadbare. At last he rose up sighing and departed in the darkness.
The hard, narrow, wretched, rickety bed of Don Quixote stood first in the middle of this star-lit stable, and close beside it Sancho made his, which merely consisted of a rush mat and a blanket that looked as if it was of
threadbare canvas rather than of wool.