Of these professional tramps a great many had, of course, been
shiftless and vicious all their lives.
Don't you dare answer me back that imperdent way, Rebecca, tellin' me I'm mean; your father was a vain, foolish,
shiftless man, an' you might as well hear it from me as anybody else; he spent your mother's money and left her with seven children to provide for.
It had never dawned upon him that this
shiftless, thriftless, worthless, sponging parasite was yet, after and in spite of all, not mercenary in the issue of his thoughts; yet so it was.
The physician with his theory, rather obtained from than corrected by experiments on the human constitution; the pious, self- denying, laborious, and ill-paid missionary; the half-educated, litigious, envious, and disreputable lawyer, with his counterpoise, a brother of the profession, of better origin and of better character; the
shiftless, bargaining, discontented seller of his “betterments;” the plausible carpenter, and most of the others, are more familiar to all who have ever dwelt in a new country.
To expand, without bothering about it--without
shiftless timidity on one side, or loquacious eagerness on the other--to the full compass of what he would have called a "pleasant" experience, was Newman's most definite programme of life.
This going to hunt up her
shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs Durbeyfield's still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing children.
The community is eminently Portuguese--that is to say, it is slow, poor,
shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
Philip was interested in her
shiftless life, and she made him laugh with the fantastic narration of her struggles.
What
shiftless people they are--such a want of education,' thought Vasili Andreevich, and he felt like taking the drugget off the horse and putting it over Nikita, but it would be very cold to get out and move about and, moreover, the horse might freeze to death.
There was no reason why he should go out of his way to back up a
shiftless party like me, yet he did, and made many things easy and safe that would have been confoundedly hard and dangerous if I 'd been left to myself.
