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More "Disillusion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... self-analysis; the end with the more sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him who places his faith in illusion—the only reality—and woe to him who does not. In one way lies disillusion with its pain, in ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... feet, and stammer forth his wretched tale! She was of his flesh, of his blood; when she knew she would not wholly condemn him . . . No, no! He could not. She honored and trusted him now; she had placed him on so high a pedestal that it was utterly impossible for him to disillusion her young mind, to see for ever and ever the mute reproach in her honest eyes, to feel that though his arm encircled her she was beyond his reach.... God knew that he could not tell this child of the black gulf he had digged for himself ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... worth while to play the soft, sleepy role behind which she hid her fierce nature, would stick at nothing to get rid of Christine and set the whole world against her. Though the girl's resolution held firm, a dull despair filled her. How vile and cruel life could be! Friendship was a mockery; love, disillusion and ashes; nothing held sweet and true but the hearts of little children. An arid conclusion for a girl from whom the gods had not withdrawn those two surpassing and swiftly passing gifts—youth ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... the poems of disillusion which are the outcome of this mood, is "The Newcomer's Wife," with the terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... sometimes meet with a girl who is not yet half through her teens, yet seems in some ways more consciously developed than any one else that I have met here. She has passed part of her life on the mainland, and the disillusion she found in Galway has ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... Jill into the house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at bottom related to our primary desires, and when they are ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... that one can secure a divorce in Reno without having to present grounds or causes for it. Let me hasten to disillusion such "idealists." As mentioned above, there are seven causes for divorce in this State, any one of which in the eyes of the liberal Nevada law, is sufficient justification ...
— Reno - A Book of Short Stories and Information • Lilyan Stratton
... of view was altered. He was confident that his interest in Lady Dawn was on an utterly different footing. He had never had this peacefulness of feeling for any woman. He marveled at it. He had to fight the disillusion that it might be no more than a mood. His liking for her had come to him so suddenly. Suddenness in the emotions prompted him to distrust. Yet his present contentment seemed as secure as it was incomprehensible. ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... disillusion soon came; she could not conceal from herself that she had been basely deceived and abandoned by the man she loved so ardently. She learned that Bigot had been elevated to the high office of Intendant of New France, but ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... sense of the Puritans which made them what they were in politics and religion. That a great change should be wrought in the settlers by the circumstances of their position was inevitable; that this change should have had some disillusion in it, that it should have weaned them from the ideal and wonted them to the actual, was equally so. In 1664, not much more than a generation after the settlement, Williams prophesies: "When we that have been the eldest are rotting (to-morrow or next day) a generation will act, I fear, far unlike ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Another disillusion weighed upon my soul. Before I went up the Nile, I had a fancy of my own that the bank was studded with endless ruined temples, whose vast red colonnades were reflected in the water at every turn. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... the dismay, the disillusion, the nausea which ravaged him he was unwillingly conscious of fragments of thoughts that flickered like transient flames far below in the deep mines of his being.... "You are an astounding woman, Con." ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... respectful humour. He had seen victory slip within his grasp, and slip out of it, so often that he was on the verge of complete demoralization, but he thought that he alone was aware of it, and because of his pride, Anna didn't disillusion him. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, and the ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... school had no charms for Nance. On the one occasion when curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket. Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... to know that Otto Kahn sees eye to eye with me. The utter degradation of the fine old Germany by Prussia was a bitter disillusion of my young manhood. What must it have been to Otto Kahn? He loved the old Germany to which he was "linked by ties of blood, by fond memories and cherished sentiments." To cast her out of his soul—to range himself in the forefront of those fighting the abomination ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... What a disillusion it was to find on our arrival at Zandspruit that there were no tents, and as yet no provisions of any kind! So we were initiated by having to pass the first nights of our commando life on the open veld with insufficient food. And in the daytime our work ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... two he realized that she had asked him a question. He didn't want to disillusion her in any way, and, after all, an FBI agent was a kind of detective, but he thought it was only fair that she should know the whole truth about him right ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to summer garden parties for children, but these for some reason are less the vogue. As a rule parties are not enjoyed by nervous children. There is intense excitement in anticipation, and when at length the moment arrives, there is apt to be disillusion. Either the excitement of the child may pass all bounds and end in tears and so-called naughtiness, or the unfamiliar surroundings may leave him distrait with a strange sense of unreality and unhappiness. It is not always fair to blame the want ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... for the first time—he really and thoroughly comprehended her self-sacrifice, the almost bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the force of her love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a child wonders at things, how he had been able during all these years quite simply, with indeed the almost incredible simplicity of man, never to be shared by any ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... it is true, but at the same time solemn and reiterated. They might have believed that when they disembarked at Carthage the town would be abandoned to them, and that they should have treasures divided among them; and when they saw that scarcely their wages would be paid, the disillusion touched their pride ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert
... for whom it was impossible to feel indifference; one either hated him or became fascinated by his curious and peculiar charm. This quality led many admirers to remain faithful to him even after disillusion had shattered their former friendship, and who, whilst refusing to speak to him any more, yet retained for him a deep affection which not even the conviction that it had been misplaced could alter. This is a remarkable and indisputable fact. ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... his head. It seemed to him at that moment as if he never could eat or sleep again, the disillusion was so bitter, ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... opportunity. This was a likeable old sea-dog, and he determined not to impose upon him another moment. Some men, for the sake of the adventure, would have left the truth to be found out later, to the disillusion of all concerned. The abrupt manner in which Miss Killigrew had abandoned him ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... dream,—the vague indefinable longing which possessed him for love—pure, disinterested, unselfish love,—seemed on the verge of coming true. Yet he would not allow himself to hope too much,—he preferred to look on the darker side of probable disillusion. Meanwhile, he was conscious of a sweetness and comfort in his life such as he had never yet experienced. His thoughts dwelt with secret pleasure on the open frankness and calm beauty of the face that had bent over ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... Italy, man presents himself like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of the worlds. From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe? Whither are vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened? Is it final despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit of the world, ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... that he really loved her. She had thrown him and Celeste together in vain. Poor Celeste, poor lovely Celeste, who wore her heart upon her sleeve, patent to all eyes save Donald's! Thus, it was with defined purpose that she had lured him this night into the garden. She wanted to disillusion him. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... never have believed. Now, however, a new light seemed thrown upon her—there was a touch of something base in her beauty—a flash of cruelty in her smile—a hardness in her eyes. Maryllia looked at her wistfully now and then, and was half sorry she had invited her, the disillusion was ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... between the bubbling energy of youth and the steady energy of middle age. For, although Gogol was still young in years when he composed "Dead Souls," the decade that separated the two works was for the author a constant progress in disillusion. In the sixth chapter of the latter book, Gogol has himself revealed the sad transformation that had taken place in his own mind, and that made his genius express itself in so ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... marrying Friederike. His real blame consists in the heedlessness with which, in the beginning of their acquaintance, he surrendered himself to the charm of her presence, thereby engaging her affection without a thought of the consequences to either. Besides the disillusion, which showed him, when he came fairly to face the question, that he did not love her sufficiently to justify marriage, there were circumstances—material, economical—which made it practically impossible. Her suffering in the separation, great as it was,—so great indeed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... known more of the Pan-Germanic mind than her naive husband had guessed—who, moreover, had had a long and enlightening interview with one of her sons but a month before—undertook to win over many women of her own class who had suffered death and disillusion. ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... young, curiously inexperienced. She had expected life to go on as dawn for ever. Everyday light had filled her with bleakness and disillusion. She had had childish fancies; that her husband did not really love her; that she counted for nothing in his life. Yet Sir Hugh had never changed, except that he very seldom made love to her and that she ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... of Black Leaves I-IV Elegy Sequence I-X Disillusion November Afternoon Yareth at Solomon's Tomb Argolis St. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Marjorie Allen Seiffert
... with the groom quickly, and naturally, perhaps, bred contempt and disillusion. His coarseness offended every susceptibility; he was frankly impossible in such an intimate relation; and after she had given birth to a daughter in Holland, she arranged a separation, for which the groom was, at least, as grateful as herself. The child—the very sight of ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... telling us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... exclusiveness could not go farther Discover the writers in a day when all are writing! Feigned utter condemnation to make partial comfort acceptable Frozen vanity called pride, which does not seek to be revenged Half-truth that we may put on the mask of the whole Hopes of a coming disillusion that would restore him How angry I should be with you if you were not so beautiful! I can confess my sight to be imperfect: but will you ever do so? If there's no doubt about it, how is it I have a doubt about it? It is not high flying, which usually ends in heavy falling Let none of ...
— Quotations from the Works of George Meredith • David Widger
... effect is that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... dream was annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite her tragic disillusion, was less desolated than made solemn. In the most disturbing way she knew herself to be the daughter of her father and her mother; and she comprehended that her destiny could not be broken off suddenly from theirs. ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... to my mind's eye that it became unnecessary for me to see the creature, and I ceased to look for him; then all at once came disillusion, when one day, hearing the familiar high-pitched laugh with its penetrating and somewhat nasal tone, I looked and beheld the thing that had laughed just leaving its perch on a branch near the ground and winging its way across the field. It was ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... flatter me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing a wall when the sentry's back was turned, and caught in conference ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... and want there was an end. On the bed, stretched at full length, with his Grand Army hat flung beside him, lay the inventor, dead. A little round hole in the temple, from which a few drops of blood had flowed, told what remained of his story. In the night disillusion had come, with failure. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... wickedness in the outside world, but never suspected that her own immediate circle, the nice people with whom she talked pleasantly every day, could be tainted; and the awakening to find that her friends cared less disinterestedly for her than she did for them was a cruel disillusion. Her first inclination was to fly far from them all, and spend the rest of her days amongst strangers who could not disappoint her because she would have nothing to expect of them, and who might perhaps come to care for her really. Long hours she ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... again and he heard his teeth rattle. He must move from this spot, forever now to be associated with black disillusion. He arose from his seat and was dismayed to hear a hail from the Montague girl. Was he never to be free from her? She was poised at a little distance, one hand raised to him, no longer the drenched victim of a capricious Rosenblatt, but the beaming, joyous figure ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the Thoughts on the Present Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the magnificent panegyric on the British Constitution in 1790. "Not many persons in the last century could have divined from the previous ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... before me for some grave wrong, and that I know their guilt. Having lost confidence in their own and other people's words, they revere my silence, even as people revere every silence and every mystery. If I were to start to speak suddenly, I would again become human to them and would disillusion them bitterly, no matter what I would say; in my silence I am to them like their eternally silent God. For these strange people would cease believing their God as soon as their God would commence ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... or a suicide, to the great astonishment of the world which, even then, hesitates to recognize in that access of folly the proof, the blow, more formidable, more instantaneous in its ravages, than those of love-sudden disillusion. When the disaster is not interrupted by acts of violence, it causes an irreparable destruction of the youthfulness of the soul, it is the idea instilled in us forever that all can betray, since we have been betrayed in that manner. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have at least got a few inexpensive cushions to go on with, and I would have put my fist ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... would shudder at that fate for anything I loved. Do you know, Captain Lingard, how people lost in a maze end?" he went on holding Lingard by a steadfast stare. "No? . . . I will tell you then. They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion and despair." ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... parable of the Lost Coin shows that it may be occasioned by misfortune or accident. The parable of the Prodigal Son, however, shows that it is usually due to willful choice and to a desire for indulgence. Its results are sketched in appalling colors. We are shown all its disillusion, suffering, slavery, and despair. As a picture of the inevitable consequences of sin, no touch could be added to the scene of the prodigal in the far country when he had spent all, when the famine had arisen, when he had sold himself to feed swine and was unable to be satisfied even ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... very rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... said of St. Ignace, and so long had the name been familiar throughout New France, that my first view of the place brought me bitter disappointment. The faces of the others in our party pictured the same disillusion. ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... boat. It rains. The Tarasconese hero salutes the Ashes. The truth about William Tell. Disillusion. Tartarin of Tarascon never existed. ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... the moon, but, in sad disillusion, Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast, And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion 'Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past; Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... me step into that gold-and-purple dining-room at Pagliano, the incarnation of her vision, as she was the incarnation of mine, Bianca must have waited confidently for this hour, knowing that it was foreordained to come. Bitterness and disillusion were all ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... high; the cutting open of the giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible means could he have imagined a person sitting down to ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... knows how to keep a strict watch over himself will be able to escape the causes of disillusion, which lead us through fatal paths of error, to the brink ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... Langleys to the East Side club girls—brought up from New York in the special train—and a flourishing consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the presence of Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, she rightly conjectured that he had been walking in a circle, doubtless at a loss what course ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... manual labour, ignorant of the simplest principles of mining, poorly supplied—when at all—with the necessary implements, they rushed to the mines with but scanty provision even of food; fevers seized them, strange diseases attacked them—most of all, disillusion confronted them; out of Ovando's 2500 men more than one thousand died within a brief period, in the most wretched manner. Those who had the courage and strength to work, barely made enough to feed ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... once became interested in the views of a new passenger concerning the local politics of San Francisco, and he found himself utterly forgotten. The bonnetless woman had changed her position, and her head was no longer visible. The disillusion and depression that overcame him suddenly were as complete as his previous expectations and hopefulness had been extravagant. For the first time his utter unimportance in the world and his inadequacy to this new life around him came ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... this hour of disillusion and humiliation that she turned for solace to de Cosse, whose touching constancy at last found its reward. It was not long before friendship ripened into a love as ardent as his own; and for the first time this fickle beauty, whose heart had been a pawn in the game ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... too simple for Mascagni's strong dramatic talent, hence the lack of interest, hence the disillusion of so many. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... while." Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a while, anyway," he ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... myself on him, I grabbed him by his pigtail and landed in his face a number of blows straight from the shoulder. When I let him go, he threw himself down crying, and implored my pardon. Once and for all to disillusion the Tibetan on one or two points, I made him lick my shoes clean with his tongue, in the presence of the assembled Shokas. This done, he tried to scamper away, but I caught him once more by his pigtail, and kicked ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... became generally known that "with the exception of Cervignano and Monfalcone, our soldiers have been received, on the other side of the old frontier, with demonstrations quite the reverse of enthusiastic on the part of the agrarian population. The surprise and disillusion of our troops were very great, for they expected from our unredeemed brothers, who all speak our language, a joyous reception." This frigidity may, however, have been due to the influence of Austrian priests and gendarmes. What are we to say, though, when we come to the more enlightened ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... least partially lifting the scales that darkened her eyes. For he was always seeking her out, conversing with her, and it was evident to her mind that he had set himself to bring back that wanderer to the fold. But the very next Sunday brought a great disillusion. As usual her daughter did not go to church in the morning, but when the bells were calling to evening service, and she stood with Fan ready to leave the house, she still lingered, looking very pale, her hands trembling a little with her agitation, afraid to go out too soon ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... her skin remained in my fingers, the odor of her skin, in my brain, the taste of her kisses, on my lips, the sound of her voice lingered in my ears, the touch of her clasp still clung to me, and the burning charm of her tenderness still gratified my senses long after the delight but disillusion of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... straits. Must he tell Bennett the truth? Must this final disillusion be added to that long train of others, the disasters, the failures, the disappointments, and deferred hopes of all those past months? Must Bennett die hugging to his heart this bitterness ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... Disillusion was to follow soon enough. She might be, by he grace of her dowry, Queen of England, but she was soon to discover that to King Charles she was no more than a wife de jure. With wives de facto Charles would people his seraglio as fancy ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... to the disillusion. In all his troubles and perplexities the good Bishop of S— had been a rock to lean on for ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... been many such days; there had been many such feasts. But not for them! It was the golden age of their existence. The moment of youth and joy, unmarred by disillusion. ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... penitence. Crispus had wished to transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over the terrified girl. Lygia felt guilty, but not to that degree. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... more. Shelley, the "Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; Plato's more explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger assurance. But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh. He steeps ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... in the last disillusion, "is science, since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic, cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... high-road, his profession led nowhither. The thrill of adventure had gone from it. It was static, and Paul's temperament was dynamic. He had also lost his boyish sense of importance, of being the central figure in the little stage. Disillusion began to creep over him. Would he do nothing else but this all his life? Old Erricone, the patriarchal, white-bearded Italian, the doyen of the models of London, came before his mind, a senile posturer, mumbling dreary tales of his inglorious achievements: how he was the Roman Emperor in ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... predominant. In the "Marie Antoinette," what bitter disappointment! In the "Napoleon," what disillusion with the toys of the world in which he had reigned! In the "David"—Biblical subject treated by a modern chisel—what strange impressions and reflections are suggested by that tranquil head and the wonderful frailty of the body! how original the conception of the figure, and the ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... much inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M—— ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to his creature, Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture to say, and to save his reputation he ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... after a few seconds—seeing that dinner was certainly ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an old acquaintance which ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... laying his thin hand upon Christian's shoulder, he said, "My friend, you have saved me. In the first shock of my disillusion I never thought of this. I think—I think there is work ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... sense of disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for the advance ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... her, heaven-rending passion—yea, when for her every veil seemed rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth—then—after all this wonder and miracle—in crept a poisonous grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion that bit her to madness, so that she really was a mad ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... softly, partly from the pain of the man's unconsciously cruel grasp, partly frotn disillusion, partly from a fear that she had to do ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... is no posing, self-conscious Byronism, nor any of that morbid dallying with the idea of "sin" which gives such an unpleasant flavor to a good deal of romantic poetry, both French and English. There are traces of disappointment and disillusion, but they are accepted without a murmur as inevitable incidents of a great, absorbing experience. All this means, of course, that there is no tragic depth, and little analytic subtlety, in these poems. They are the work of a young man enamoured of his youth, enthusiastically grateful for ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... skilled in mines and assay of ore in that kingdom, they might perhaps be able to furnish the accurate tests there that had not been arrived at here. If they did not succeed in ascertaining its quality there, that would be a greater proof of the disillusion that is talked of here. He trusted that what might be done in this matter be most expedient for the service of the king our sovereign. The assembly having discussed and conferred upon the question put by ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... coming into the chill world; but, as before at the wharf, so now at his farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to enthusiastic thankfulness that ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... one moment, only, her mind dwelt upon herself. Then all thought of self was merged in the realisation of his loneliness, his suffering, his bitter disillusion. To have found her dead, would have been hard; to have lost her living, was almost past bearing. Would it cost him his faith in God, in truth, in ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... clear, Nature and nothing else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my eyes in pain—pain for disillusion? No—now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... them, discouraged, had returned to a "bourgeois" manner of life, some even to a "bourgeois" philosophy. Almost all of the anarchists I have known lost their philosophy and enthusiasm with middle age, and experience with the actual constitution of things, combined with disillusion regarding the ideal. Most of them had been hurt or broken by their attempt, but they all retained a certain something, a certain remaining dignity of having struggled against the inevitable, and had acquired insight into some of the deeper things in life, though having lost some ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... have become a Benedictine and sought a lettered and cloistered peace. I despaired of finding anywhere upon earth the profound quietude, the absolute detachment, when a chance occasion seemed to crown my desire, and blind to all warnings of disillusion, I suddenly set sail for what I then thought might be a permanent sojourn ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... the disillusion of one who wanted to try its effects on a dog. The poor beast howled with the pain but did not present ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... morning Sally had a heavy head as the result of her unusual entertainment, and she awoke to a sense of disillusion. The room was the same ugly room, but her dreams had fled. So must Cinderella have felt upon awaking after her first ball. The colours had faded; the rapturous consciousness of power had died in the night. Sally ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... in reality he was studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... exhibited in Aprile, and in the poet Eglamor, whom Sordello foils and subdues in the contest of song. The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully—and yet with a difference—in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... beautifully rounded chin, the short straight nose, and delicately curved upper lip, that he had seen in the profile,—and yet—yet it was not the same face he had dreamt of. With an odd, provoking sense of disillusion, he swept ahead of the coach, and again slackened his speed to let it pass. This time the fair unknown raised her long lashes and gazed suddenly at this persistent horseman at her side, and an odd expression, it seemed to him almost a glance of recognition and expectation, ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... responsibility. In this regard, Sylvie Hermenstein had acted wisely by removing herself from association, or "blind contact" with her would-be lover,—and yet, though she was aware that her doing so had caused a certain dispersal of the atmosphere which almost veered towards complete disillusion, she found nevertheless, that Rome as she had said, was "dull"; her heart was empty, and longing for she knew not what. And that deep longing she felt could not have been completely gratified by the brief ardours of Fontenelle. And so she ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... replied, hotly, with a subtle rush of disillusion, a dulling of enchantment. "Don't you class me with other men who've kissed you. I wasn't myself when I did it an' I'd have gone on my knees to ask your forgiveness.... But now I wouldn't—an' I wouldn't kiss you again, either—even if ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... that he discovered what had hitherto been hidden from him—the disillusion of his senses. None the less did he make professions of ardent love; but in order to call up such emotions he found it necessary to evoke the images of Rosanette and ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... no background of anything but perfect joy, when Myra was his wife. Would he not have the turning of the fair leaves of her book of life? Each page should unfold fresh happiness, hold new surprises as to what life and love could mean. He would know how to guard her from the faintest shadow of disillusion. Even now it was his right to keep her from that. How much, after all, should he tell her of the heart-searchings of these wretched weeks? Last night he had meant to tell her everything; he had meant to say: "I have sinned against heaven—the ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... many other methods and forces have already emerged, and must yet emerge, beside it! The men know it. And meanwhile, the women—a section of women—have seized with the old faith, on the confident cries of sixty years ago?—with the same disillusion ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... into such dangerous companionship with the vulgarities and sentimentalities of the London stage. I heard people around me confessing that they had not read the book. How terrible must have been the disillusion of those people, if they had ever expected anything of Tolstoi, and if they really believed that this demagogue Prince, who stands in nice poses in the middle of drawing-rooms and of prison cells, talking nonsense with a convincing disbelief, was ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... even without a bribe, his bargaining position is not strong. In the meantime he may make trouble. If so, it can't be helped. But it will do him no good, and may even help to bring nearer the inevitable day of disillusion. I may add that for France to agree to a short moratorium is not a great sacrifice since, on account of the Belgian priority and other items, the amount of cash to which France will be entitled in the near future, even if the payments fixed last March were ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... conclusion. Pascal's disillusioned analysis of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark night, which is an essential stage in the progress ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... has really developed so successfully as it might have done; many believe that it finds itself in a cul-de-sac. But what is to be done? The experienced can see that many of the offered reforms are but the repetition of old mistakes which will involve us in the unhappy cycle of disillusion and failure. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if men everywhere are seeking for a sign, a glimpse of a scheme of life, a view of reality, a hint of human destiny and the true outcome of human effort, to be an inspiration and a guide ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... deigned to show thee 5 Destiny, and disillusion Fills thy heart at all things human, ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman
... been winning. The one that one had been was one expressing being that one the one that one had been. The one that one had been was one expressing being completing being willing, being not willing to be winning what she had not been winning. The one that one had been was one expressing disillusion. The one that one had been was one expressing illusion. The one that one had been was one expressing having been such a one the one that one had been, was expressing having been completing willing the thing she had not been winning. The one that one had been was expressing some such thing, was ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"—you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... remnant of hope. They are there, the disappointed ones, but he doesn't know, he doesn't know! He hasn't on his conscience the memory of hearts cruelly wounded,—wounded even to death. He doesn't in memory see the eagerness in a good friend's eyes die to disillusion, to hopelessness, to bitter, bitter sorrow. He doesn't have to remember how the life died suddenly out of a voice that had been tender and eloquent. He doesn't sicken with the thought that his hand has given a blow so merciless, so unmerited, and yet so inevitable. ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the poor, pretty weak-willed baby of a thing that was her mother, taking the line of least resistance, the husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... it. The feminine mind, which rules in English fiction, both as producer and as consumer, craves inevitably a more confident and comforting view of the world than Conrad has to offer. It seeks, not disillusion, but illusion. It protects itself against the disquieting questioning of life by pretending that all the riddles have been solved, that each new sage answers them afresh, that a few simple principles ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Disenchantment! Disillusion! Must each noble aspiration Come at last to this conclusion, Jarring discord, wild confusion, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... no need to tell of the disillusion that gradually came. Frank found his debts mounting up and his cares increasing. She was all sympathy and regret when he mentioned it, but—there were certain comforts, luxuries and things she had ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... she roused from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had been ready to rush to him, to succor and forgive, but he had not called upon her. Now in her great need, she was calling to him, and he did not come. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... hand, I tried to look up; but it was in vain. The sting of sudden and complete disillusion had struck me to the heart; I knew my ...
— The Hermit Of ——— Street - 1898 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)
... Englishman who does not speak our tongue or know our conventions. So was it with me, and I soon found myself up against a real live German, a man of a type you would not find either in London or Paris. It was a disillusion. Here was a man unsuited by his national nature for the part for which he was cast. One could not see in him the potentiality of a helper of Europe. The German as a German is in a troubled mental state. Small wonder! Because of the psychology of my friend ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances—so little like that which she had anticipated as the future lot of a painter's wife—had left her rather weary, a trifle ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... essence of party government; while it is necessary to draw a firm line between Disraeli's genial declamation and his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the event which he looked to as the inauguration of the ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... incongruous facade of Milan Cathedral. And for any one who with Wordsworth's exquisite sonnet on King's College Chapel in his mind has the misfortune to enter that long tunnel, beplastered with false ornament, the disillusion is unforgettable. Robert Browning presents a highly instructive example of the poet as critic. He was interested in many artists in many fields of art, yet it seems impossible for him to be interested in any who were not second-rate ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... rid him for the time of Rachel, of Anna, of the years of befuddling emptiness that had marked his attitudes toward the surfaces of thought about him. The emotionless disillusion of his nature had finally produced an adventure for ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... for anything I loved. Do you know, Captain Lingard, how people lost in a maze end?" he went on holding Lingard by a steadfast stare. "No? . . . I will tell you then. They end by hating their very selves, and they die in disillusion and despair." ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... that her sister, the mother of Ivan, had been married when she was herself a child scarce out of arms. But he wondered to find how very few of his aunt's intimates remembered the age of her daughter, now for many years convent-wrapped. His first moment of disillusion came on the day that his aunt informed him, with considerable asperity, that his pretty cousin was not a person to be mentioned in their circle—the reason given—that "she was not yet out,"—sounding rather flimsy even to ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... hearsay and inherited formula knew not where to look for the renewal of faith and hope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... will have twenty-four hours in which to get away before he returns. But even if you decide to await his return, it will not be too late. His utter self-absorption must give you a final disillusion. ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... discussion of every problem a definitely Spanish flavour. He is unmistakably a Spaniard even when he is trying most rigorously to be unbiased and international. He thinks out everything in Spanish terms. In him, from first to last, one observes all the peculiar qualities of the Iberian mind—its disillusion, its patient weariness, its pervasive melancholy. Spain, I take it, is the most misunderstood of countries. The world cannot get over seeing it through the pink mist of Carmen, an astounding Gallic caricature, half flattery and ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... left her in a very distressed state of mind. It is a horrible disillusion when a girl begins to suspect that her mother is not sincere, and that her ideals of life are mean. This knowledge may exist with the deepest affection—indeed, in a noble mind, with an inward tenderness and an almost divine pity. How many times have we seen a daughter loyal to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... should be roused and fear inspired by a man so young and inexperienced as Caius Gracchus. But the popular fancy is often caught by the immaturity that is as yet unhampered by caution and undimmed by disillusion, and by the fresh young voice that has not yet been attuned to the poor half-truths which are the stock-in-trade of the worldly wise. And those who were about Gracchus must soon have seen that the traces of youth were to be found only in his passion, his frankness, his impetuous ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... with unpleasant people. He had too much money—and that is ruinous for a boy. I hate to disillusion you, but for several years people have been gossipping about Duane Mallett's exploits abroad; and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in the actuality ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... mother, with a keen glance at the girl's flushing cheek. "Well, in one sense it is true. Love is a beautiful thing to look at—an angel to outward show—with the heart, too often, of a fiend; and it is he who leads us to that precipice of which I spoke—the precipice of disillusion and despair." ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... accusing the Elect of giving themselves over to reprehensible practices in their private meetings. They condemned marriage and child-bearing as works of the devil, but they authorized fornication, and even, it is said, certain acts against nature. That, for Augustin, was the final disillusion. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the Allies!" The repulse of the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success. The effect was seen in a renewal of German peace propaganda, which all the Allies had learned by this time to disregard as unworthy of ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... presses upon his time, in clear and unimpassioned voice, the claim of neglected Hellenism. Rossetti, with heavy, half-closed eyes, hardly distinguishes the body from the soul. Mr. Thomas Hardy, the Titan of the modern world, whose heart is sore with disillusion and the bitterness of the earth, and yet blind to the light of heaven that still shines upon it, has lived into the generation which is reading Mr. Wells and Mr. Shaw. These appear to be outside of all such distinctions as pagan and idealist; ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... expressing being that one the one that one had been. The one that one had been was one expressing being completing being willing, being not willing to be winning what she had not been winning. The one that one had been was one expressing disillusion. The one that one had been was one expressing illusion. The one that one had been was one expressing having been such a one the one that one had been, was expressing having been completing willing the thing she had not been winning. ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... only, her mind dwelt upon herself. Then all thought of self was merged in the realisation of his loneliness, his suffering, his bitter disillusion. To have found her dead, would have been hard; to have lost her living, was almost past bearing. Would it cost him his faith in God, in truth, in ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... Railroad bridges to cut!—Frozen creeks, frozen rivers, steel in a world of snow—Kelly probably already at Cumberland, and Rosecrans beyond at Wheeling—hunger, cold, winter in the spurs of the Alleghenies, disease, stragglers, weariness, worn-out shoes, broken-down horses, disappointment, disillusion, a very, very strange commanding general—Suddenly confidence, heretofore a somewhat limping attendant of the army, vanished quite away. The shrill, derisive wind, the grey wraiths of snow, the dusk of the mountains took her, conveyed her from sight, and left the Army of the Northwest ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... la Marquise and indeed indirectly serves her still. I was not therefore acquainted with the events of the tour which followed the two betrothals, until after the return of the expedition; and it was a great disillusion for me to find that the unfortunate gentleman and the less than lady were still ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... her life, Sylvia would never forget the rending shock of disillusion brought her by these blunt words. She did not dream of disbelieving them, or of underestimating their significance. A thousand confirmatory details leaped into her mind: the rich, sweet voices—the dramatic ability—the banjo—the deprecatory air of timidity—the self-conscious unwillingness ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Whitaker spared him disillusion. Painting with Kenny was an occupation, never work. When it slipped tiresomely into the class of work and palled, he threw it aside ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... lover's clasp. And how should thought know thought until the whole Of body's beauty is by body learnt? Until the trial of that most dear seclusion Is past, and all the dangers of mere lust Disproved, when in possession is no stale Regret and disillusion, how should be known That the still hours of thought with thought are stable Against the wearing of dissolving time? Dear, we must love by all the tokens of love, Before the presence of love beyond dispute Is between us ...
— Preludes 1921-1922 • John Drinkwater
... sympathy with the spiritual life of their respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... in Stendhal's life, which, viewed impartially, is a simple and somewhat pathetic record of failure and disillusion. He was six years older than Balzac, having been born January 23d, 1783, in the small town of Grenoble, in Dauphine, which, with its narrow prejudices and petty formalism, seemed to him in after years ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... seeing you all so young and inexperienced, so full of vain hopes, I have reconstructed in my own mind what might be called the psychology of the cadet. I can guess all that you thought before entering the academy, and I foresee the bitter and crushing disillusion that awaits you on leaving it. The history of wars and the artistic trappings of the uniform have seduced your youth. Afterwards, warlike tales of an irresistible fascination—Bonaparte with his little band crossing the bridge at Arcola ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Cross. Unfortunately the generosity of many in America, and particularly those of German descent, has not been fully recognized or appreciated by the people of Germany. The total sum remitted to Germany for our Red Cross and other similar societies amounts to over 20,000,000 marks. The disillusion of our people at home when they realized the slight political influence exercised by the German-American element in the United States has led them to overlook their great achievements in the cause of charity, which were inspired ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... wife for him among the families of the surrounding clergy. His step was sometimes quite springy when he left the Spittal; but Grizel's shadow was always waiting for him somewhere on the way home, to take the life out of him, and after that it was again, oh, sorrowful disillusion! oh, world gone gray! Grizel did not admire him. T. Sandys was no longer a wonder to Grizel. He went home to that as surely as the labourer ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... communion must be our last. Ever since she had seen me step into that gold-and-purple dining-room at Pagliano, the incarnation of her vision, as she was the incarnation of mine, Bianca must have waited confidently for this hour, knowing that it was foreordained to come. Bitterness and disillusion were all that it had ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... heart to disillusion him of the notion that there could be something delightful apart from her, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... A gesture of disillusion. She draws slowly away from the statue, letting her flowers fall, broken-hearted, and begins to ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... the country, the child is very near to Nature's heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by name. He is sublimely superstitious. His imagination, as yet untouched by disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy body the soul ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... as time went on she could not shut her eyes to Sydney's habit of referring every question to the test of personal expediency. It was her first great disillusion, but the pain which it caused her was on her parents' behalf rather than on her own. They were the chief sufferers; they gave him so much and received so little in return. To be sure, Sydney was only what they had made him. They bade him "take," in language which he ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was uppermost in her mind when she opened her eyes; and the girl, under the impression of so disgusting a disillusion, remained for a while pondering and yawning, before making up her mind to exchange warmth and ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... a rather whimsical smile. "I'll try to disillusion you to begin with. Perhaps if you understand me better ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... days when great men thought that what is falling in decay must be built afresh. Great contention arose therefrom, much knavery, much disillusion; finally the whole had ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... other, on either side of the fire—the monumental matron whose black bodice heavily overhung the table, whose large rounded face was creased and wrinkled by what seemed countless years of joy and disillusion; and the young, slim girl, so fresh, so virginal, so ignorant, with all the pathos of an unsuspecting victim about to be sacrificed to the minotaur of Time! They both ate hot toast, with careless haste, in silence, preoccupied, worried, and ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... she saw very rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... I won't turn into a monkey," she said, in accents at once of disillusion and disdain. "I did not know there was any such danger. I should hate to be a monkey." Then her eyes brightened again. "May I go and get them now?" she ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... think of a foreigner merely as a sort of Englishman who does not speak our tongue or know our conventions. So was it with me, and I soon found myself up against a real live German, a man of a type you would not find either in London or Paris. It was a disillusion. Here was a man unsuited by his national nature for the part for which he was cast. One could not see in him the potentiality of a helper of Europe. The German as a German is in a troubled mental state. Small wonder! Because of the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... fancies that had held, or failed to hold him in his thirty-eight years; he recalled the women who had loved too little, the women who had loved too much; and, quick upon the recollection, came the consciousness of the disillusion that ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of all she shrank from depriving Daisy of all the rural delights on which the child's mind dwelt in fascinated anticipation. Natalya did not think much of the country herself, having been born in a poor Polish village, amid huts and pigs, but she would not disillusion Daisy. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... fed upon fiction, the first proposal comes in the nature of a shock. Disillusion follows as a matter of course. Men, evidently, do not read fiction, or at least do not profit by the valuable hints to be found in ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... do people who are not mediums. I congratulate you on liking anybody better. That's pleasant for you at any rate. My changes are always the other way. I begin by seeing the beautiful in most people, and then comes the disillusion. It isn't caprice or unsteadiness; oh no! it's merely fate. My fate, I mean. Alas, ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... after this, he was quieter, more conscious when he drank, more backward from companionship. The disillusion of his first carnal contact with woman, strengthened by his innate desire to find in a woman the embodiment of all his inarticulate, powerful religious impulses, put a bit in his mouth. He had something to lose which he was afraid of losing, which he was not sure even of possessing. ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... that we find the richest and most varied reaction to the Great Failure. It takes different shapes in those writers, like Plato and Xenophon, who were educated in the fifth century and had once believed in the Great City, and those whose whole thinking life belonged to the time of disillusion. ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... opportunity slip. There was a chance of a straight, unhampered view of the whole meaning of his matter; nothing was needed but to allow the scene to show itself, fairly and squarely. All its force would have been lent to the disaster that follows; the dismay, the disillusion, the snarl of anger and defiance, all would have been made beforehand. By so much would the effect of the impending scene, the scene of catastrophe, have been strengthened. There would have been no necessity for the sudden heightening of the pitch, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... whole soul aflame with hope and eagerness and tremulous joy, ready to burst into a blaze of happiness—and then came disillusion and despair, blacker than ever ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... lowered before the profane, even in church, were raised before the Blessed Sacrament, before God. Durtal was able to look at these sisters for a moment; at first his disillusion was complete. He had supposed them pale and grave like the nun he had seen in the gallery, and almost all of them were red, freckled, crossing their poor hands swelled and wounded by chilblains. Their faces were puffy and all seemed at the ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... notably the Via dei Condotti, at the far end of which the Trinity de' Monti, all golden in the glory of the sinking sun, appeared above that famous flight of steps, the triumphal Scala di Spagna—Pierre still and ever retained the impression of disillusion which the narrow, airless thoroughfare had conveyed to him: the "palaces" looked to him like mournful hospitals or barracks, the Piazza Colonna suffered terribly from a lack of trees, and the Trinity de' Monti alone took his fancy by its distant ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... charm of manner or grace of speech, her very voice was the deep bass of a man. In the days of her joyous entrance into London, amid the acclamations of the populace, her high spirit, her kind heart, and the excitement of adventure lent a passing glow to her sallow cheeks. But ill-health and disillusion followed. She became morbid and sullen, sometimes remaining for days in a dull stupor, at other times giving way to gusts of hysterical passion. But beneath her forbidding exterior there beat a ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... also perceived the colossal absurdity of the whole business. But I could not convince them of it, for they met my objections with excellent arguments. Nothing save a sight of the Count would, I feared, disillusion them. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... he mused. "If only the child knew! Heigh-ho! I am kind, sometimes I've been good, and often wise. Well, I can't disillusion the child, happily; she has given ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... voices, a young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... that my explanation may disillusion you but it has always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my friend Watson or from any one who might take an intelligent interest in them. But, first, as I am rather shaken by the knocking about which ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... has worked in Mr. Sinclair appears with significant emphasis in the contrast between Manassas and 100%; the two books illustrate the range of American naturalism and the progressive disillusion of a generation. Manassas is the work of a man filled with epic memories and epic expectations who saw in the Civil War a clash of titanic principles, saw a nation being beaten out on a fearful anvil, saw splendor and heroism rising up from the pits of slaughter. And in spite ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... light seemed thrown upon her—there was a touch of something base in her beauty—a flash of cruelty in her smile—a hardness in her eyes. Maryllia looked at her wistfully now and then, and was half sorry she had invited her, the disillusion was ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... that, and she has been sufficiently humble to accept him on those terms—she owes him money. If for love—she owes him at least the outside observances of love. If he has pretended love and it is for some other motive, his Nemesis will fall upon himself in the disillusion and contempt he will inspire. But in all cases the woman, through want of intelligence or pure misfortune, has crossed the Rubicon with him; she has allowed him to teach her the meaning of dual life—she ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... a succession of painful falls, whose effect is that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... as to the degree in which the precious mental particles might be expected to have wrought up the outward presence to their own high quality. A creature of the eye, in this case at least, the intellectual hold on him being what it was, Gaston had no fear of disillusion. His poetic readings had borrowed an additional relish from the genial, companionable, manner of his life at this time, taking him into the remotest corners of the vast level land, and its outer ring of blue up-lands; amid which, as he rode one day with "the three," towards ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... creature, Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture to say, and to ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley) although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who, perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... So in disillusion and disappointment, "Citizen Clough," leaving Oxford and politics behind him, settled down to educational work in London, married, and became the happy father of children, wrote much that was remarkable, and ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that portrait has Simon Perkins studied with exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... is too simple for Mascagni's strong dramatic talent, hence the lack of interest, hence the disillusion of so many. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... finishing stroke to the disillusion. In all his troubles and perplexities the good Bishop of S— had been a rock to lean on for the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... me! How stuffy this room is, and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have at least got ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... quite at her ease, armed with eyeglass and bouquet and bustle, away went my dream of the slim blushing maiden. The Colonel is quite right, Lionel; the romance once suspended, 'tis a haunting remembrance till thrown again in our way, but complete disillusion if we try to renew it; though I swear that in my case the interest was deep, and the heroine improved in her beauty. So with you and that dear little creature. See her again, and you'll tease, me no more to give you that portrait of Titania at ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dreams were succeeded by despondency and disillusion; then supervened years of impatient waiting,—a standing with folded arms when so much remained to be done, a time of despair, of restless suffering. But the Jew had acquired his franchise, and gratefully he remembered those to whom ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German • Various
... moderate music in the hideous Balliol hall. Of all the Master's women friends, I infinitely preferred Mrs. T. H. Green, John Addington Symonds' sister. She is among the rare women who have all the qualities which in moments of disillusion I deny to them. ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... felt afraid. Afraid more than ever, now that he had committed himself with Dr. Derwent. The Doctor had received his confession so calmly, whereas Arnold hoped for some degree of effusiveness. Was he—hideous doubt—preparing himself for an even worse disillusion? ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation and ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... he quickly remembered, was something which he had himself foreseen. He had never really accepted Spence's theory that early disillusion had seriously poisoned the lifesprings natural to her age. Her awakening had been certain. He had warned Spence that she would wake! He felt all the exultation of a prophet who sees his prophecy fulfilled. But common sense urged caution. To frighten her now might be fatal. He ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... again to complete separation, and so on. But the violence of the motion consisted by no means in speed: it suggested a very much retarded rolling off of a motion picture reel. There was at first an element of disillusion in the impression. I felt tempted to shout and to spur the mist into greater activity. On the surface, to both sides of the tear, waves ran out, and at the edges of the pool they rose in that same leisurely, stately way which struck me as one of the most characteristic features of that November ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... weariness and lassitude of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... it is too continuous and interesting to need elaborate argument, for nobody is likely to miss any important link in it. But Balzac has nowhere excelled in finesse and success of analysis, the double disillusion which introduces itself at once between Madame de Bargeton and Lucien, and which makes any redintegratio amoris of a valid kind impossible, because each cannot but be aware that the other has anticipated the rupture. It will not, perhaps, be a matter of such general agreement whether ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... brain he fought—fought against disillusion, claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping denunciations—the woman in ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... and respect for, a person capable of dealing his fame such a deadly blow as Mr. Froude, not unnaturally increases the irritation with which the public has read his recollections of his friends and contemporaries. The "disillusion and disenchantment" worked by the book, in so far as it affects Carlyle's fame as a prophet, is, of course, a misfortune, and a very serious one. What it was he preached when his preaching first startled ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... though not put quite so strong, Was involved in the conclusion Of my lay: Love's disillusion Was ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... From bitter disillusion felt against everything in her world her mind chilled to analysis. Her mother loved her, she believed, and yet—she did not complete her swift thought; indeed, she looked quickly about in fear of her disloyalty. She had once thought that mothers ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... wonder—I did not wish to speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"—you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... the young ministers of the Gospel were provided with small diaries, in which they might record the dying messages of the wounded. Then came disillusion, and they found the dying had no messages to send; they are at peace, the wonderful peace that precedes the final dissolution, and all they ask ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... tremendous, and, it seemed to her, heaven-rending passion—yea, when for her every veil seemed rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth—then—after all this wonder and miracle—in crept a poisonous grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion that bit her to madness, so that she really ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... uttering these last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have received a blow had not David Cable at that moment come out of the doorway across the sidewalk, pausing for a ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... discovery was a disappointment. Having made my way into the most primitive region of all Japan, I had imagined myself far beyond the range of all modernising influences; and the suggestion of beefsteak with fried potatoes was a disillusion. Nor was I entirely consoled by the subsequent discovery that there were no ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... the candle, but lay staring at it. Her dream was annihilated. She foresaw an interminable, weary and futile future in and about Moze, and her mother always indisposed, always fretful, and curiously obstinate in weakness. But Audrey, despite her tragic disillusion, was less desolated than made solemn. In the most disturbing way she knew herself to be the daughter of her father and her mother; and she comprehended that her destiny could not be broken off suddenly from theirs. She was touched because her mother deemed her father a very wise man, whereas ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... to disillusion the sick man; and, indeed, why should he know that his Dasha was now broader than she was long, and that she was living under the protection of some merchants, the brothers Kondatchkov, that she used powder and paint, and was for ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... from New York in the special train—and a flourishing consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers overflow ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... staying the night. He was very fresh and pleasant to look at; he seemed old for his years, which were few; he had a range of interests as well as powers of expression. Did he seem just a little conscious of his tender age? Was he not a bit too anxious to profess disillusion? Yes, he was cynical about Belgians, also about France, also about the Foreign Office. I suffered him thus far with a certain guilty gladness. But the Intelligence Officer demurred grimly. He was a patriot and a fighting man. They had switched a maxim on to him years before, but he was ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... Myra was his wife. Would he not have the turning of the fair leaves of her book of life? Each page should unfold fresh happiness, hold new surprises as to what life and love could mean. He would know how to guard her from the faintest shadow of disillusion. Even now it was his right to keep her from that. How much, after all, should he tell her of the heart-searchings of these wretched weeks? Last night he had meant to tell her everything; he had meant to say: "I have sinned against heaven—the heaven of our love—and ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... the chance to become a power in statecraft. But when Iris had given herself and her six hundred a year, she soon remarked a decline in her husband's aspiration. Presently Woolstan began to complain of an ailment, the result of arduous labour and of disillusion, which might make it imperative for him to retire from the monotonous toil of the Civil Service; before long, he withdrew to a pleasant cottage in Surrey, where he was to lead a studious life and compose a great political work. The man ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... word about The Return (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and in disillusion. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... charms for Nance. On the one occasion when curiosity had induced her to follow the stream of well-dressed children into the side door of the cathedral, she had met with disillusion. It was a place where little girls lifted white petticoats when they sat down and straightened pink sashes when they got up, and put nickels in a basket. Nance had had no lace petticoat or pink sash or nickel. She ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... with that communicative openness and joyousness of soul which he would like to find in them, if only that he might not have the vexation of convicting himself of laying up for his own fancy another disillusion. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... according as the artist is able to mould his material. Each of the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. The development of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear), through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... give it to me?" I said. "I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it 'Disillusion.' But do you think it ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... into the kitchen in time to hear the question, and Rick almost hated to give the answer, knowing that it would disillusion them, and ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... head. It seemed to him at that moment as if he never could eat or sleep again, the disillusion was so bitter, his disappointment ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... last remnant of hope. They are there, the disappointed ones, but he doesn't know, he doesn't know! He hasn't on his conscience the memory of hearts cruelly wounded,—wounded even to death. He doesn't in memory see the eagerness in a good friend's eyes die to disillusion, to hopelessness, to bitter, bitter sorrow. He doesn't have to remember how the life died suddenly out of a voice that had been tender and eloquent. He doesn't sicken with the thought that his hand has given a blow so merciless, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... affect to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... presence of Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, she rightly conjectured that he had been walking ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... full of disillusion. It has offered abundant material to the idealist who, as might be expected, has drawn of it a picture which is at once common and pretentious. Your idealist can see no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... caught a new sound on the stairs, and swiftly, instantly, instead of glancing to the entrance, her eyes sought Ranjoor Singh's; and she saw that he had heard it too. So she sat up as if enlightenment had come and had brought disillusion in its wake. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... Tevkin. The chaotic throng of dancers was a welter of color and outline so superb, I thought, that it seemed as though every face and figure in it were the consummation of youthful beauty. However, as I contemplated the individual couples, in quest of the girl who filled my thoughts, I met with disillusion after disillusion. Then, after recovering from a sense of watching a parade of uncomeliness, I began to discover figures or faces, or both, that were decidedly charming, while here and there I came upon a young woman of singular beauty. The number of good-looking women ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... returned, and laying his thin hand upon Christian's shoulder, he said, "My friend, you have saved me. In the first shock of my disillusion I never thought of this. I think—I think there ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... something more. Shelley, the "Sun-treader," weaving soul and sense into a radiant vesture "from his poet's station between both," did much to sustain him; Plato's more explicit and systematic idealism gave him for a while a stronger assurance. But disillusion broke in: "Suddenly, without heart-wreck I awoke; I said, 'twas beautiful, yet but a dream, and so adieu to it!" Then the passionate restlessness of his nature stings him forth afresh. He steeps himself in the concrete ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... opinions, or rather the manner in which he chose to express them, divided him from many good men. He was poor, and he hated his poverty. A rather imprudent marriage had turned out neither particularly well nor particularly ill. His wife had some beauty, however, and there was hardly time for disillusion. She died when Laura was still a tottering baby, and Stephen had missed her sorely for a while. Since her death he had grown to be a very lonely man, silently discontented with himself and sourly critical of his neighbours. ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... ear whispering; the cold chill of disappointment, of disillusion, of sickening doubt was in ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... educational genius will write a book to be given to every young man on the date of his disillusion. This work will have the flavor of Montaigne's essays and Samuel Butler's note-books—and a little of Tolstoi and Marcus Aurelius. It will be neither cheerful nor pleasant but will contain numerous passages ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that he could settle to nothing till he had seen her again; there was a curious jealousy in his heart about Ashton; he would have given anything he possessed to be able to disillusion her, but knew it was impossible without hopelessly ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... as to the substance of the hook, we may be allowed to notice one or two matters of literary or historical interest in which Sir Henry Maine is certainly open to criticism. There is an old question about Burke which was discussed by the present writer a long time ago. A great disillusion, says Sir Henry Maine, has always seemed to him to separate the Thoughts on the Present Discontents and the Speech on Taxation from the magnificent panegyric on the British Constitution in 1790. "Not many persons in the last century could have divined from the previous opinions of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... a supreme torment held her, which made all others seem trifling by comparison. The next moment, a new life was born into the world—a new life, with all its heritage of certain sorrow and possible joy; with all its infinite sensibility to pleasure or pain, to hope and love and disillusion. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... delightful is the anticipation as he looks over time-tables and books of photographs, forming delightful images of future pleasure! But the reality is full of disappointment, and the more famous the monument the bitterer the disillusion. Has any one seen St. Peter's without asking himself: Is that all? And the truest enjoyment arises from things that come unexpectedly, that one had never heard of. Then, living in a strange land, one loses all ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... evening, and feeling that the power to read was leaving me—for the letters from incessant perusal were losing all sap and significance: my gold was withering to leaves before my eyes, and I was sorrowing over the disillusion—suddenly a quick tripping foot ran up the stairs. I knew Ginevra Fanshawe's step: she had dined in town that afternoon; she was now returned, and would come here to replace her ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... sure that your impressions of its natural beauties are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of anticipatory disillusion. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... else did he get his divorce for?" she demanded, with the utter disillusion of knowledge which she had found to be ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... and with a gesture half of offering and half of disdain: "But who can call them well cooked if the tinning of the pot has been neglected?" And into this last phrase he added notes which hinted of sadness and of disillusion. It was very fine. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... question; but in reality he was studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her unfortunate sex!" ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! Happy!—in this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His friend's confidence only made ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... succinctness the advantage of a number. As Bill had remarked mournfully, "It wouldn't be so bad if it was number three or four, but Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A.," a mail or so late. We never told him of Van Diemen's Avenue, nor for that matter had we mentioned our neighbours. Curiously enough, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... upon mistaking you for the heir of all the Rothschilds used to cost me dear when I was younger. I find the best plan is to take him in hand at the beginning and disillusion him; sweep aside his talk of '84 Perrier Jouet, followed by a '79 Chateau Lafite, and ask him, as man to man, if he can conscientiously recommend the Saint Julien at two-and-six. After that he settles down to his work and ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... now secure on the throne of ivory and gold. A few days after he had heard the news he repeated the adventure of his boyhood; for the second time he scaled the steep hillside, and penetrated the matted brake. He expected violent disillusion, but his feeling was rather astonishment at the activity of boyish imagination. There was no terror nor amazement now in the green bulwarks, and the stunted undergrowth did not seem in any way extraordinary. Yet he did not laugh at the memory ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... and perverted, joy of life (joie de vivre) denied, will avenge themselves. They will break out in drunkenness. The hero of "One Day" is afflicted with the same vice, and apparently for the same reason. The cruel disillusion which in consequence overtakes the poor little soul-starved heroine rises almost to the height of tragedy. It is an every-day tale, full of "deep and blood-veined humanity," and deriving its interest and significance from the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... to carry on our lives through them with steadfast heart and smiling face- surely that is the part of wisdom and of true manliness. The ugly things in life seem much less formidable when thus boldly faced than when we try to shut our eyes to them, with the consequent disillusion at their continual reappearance. Confess frankly the faults of life and it becomes tolerable, is even in a fair way to become lovable. For after all, when its obvious imperfections do not blind us to its good points, it is a dear old world we live in, and the healthy minded man loves it, as he ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... told it to anyone before now, and, indeed, she had not realised several features of the case until quite lately. She told well the disillusion as to her mother, her own single-handed fight with life, the double sense of shame as to her mother's past, and her own ambiguous position. She told him how she felt at first meeting Rose Bright, of her own sense of sailing under false colours, and ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, "Too bad!" or, "I don't see how you keep- up?" and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... need to tell of the disillusion that gradually came. Frank found his debts mounting up and his cares increasing. She was all sympathy and regret when he mentioned it, but—there were certain comforts, luxuries and things she had always been accustomed to, and couldn't live without. Surely he would not have her apply ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative nature, she was unable to conceive the fact that sensibilities were ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... thrown him and Celeste together in vain. Poor Celeste, poor lovely Celeste, who wore her heart upon her sleeve, patent to all eyes save Donald's! Thus, it was with defined purpose that she had lured him this night into the garden. She wanted to disillusion him. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... accustomed to think highly, he should have retained to the last his confidence in, and respect for, a person capable of dealing his fame such a deadly blow as Mr. Froude, not unnaturally increases the irritation with which the public has read his recollections of his friends and contemporaries. The "disillusion and disenchantment" worked by the book, in so far as it affects Carlyle's fame as a prophet, is, of course, a misfortune, and a very serious one. What it was he preached when his preaching first startled the world, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... wished to transform her into an angel, to raise her to heights where love for Christ alone existed, and she had fallen in love with an Augustian. The very thought of that filled his heart with horror, strengthened by a feeling of disillusion and disappointment. No, no, he could not forgive her. Words of horror burned his lips like glowing coals; he struggled still with himself not to utter them, but he shook his emaciated hands over the terrified girl. Lygia felt guilty, but not to that degree. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... career the young ministers of the Gospel were provided with small diaries, in which they might record the dying messages of the wounded. Then came disillusion, and they found the dying had no messages to send; they are at peace, the wonderful peace that precedes the final dissolution, and all they ask is ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... were the years in which he came nearest to despair. The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion. As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult. The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally. Whatever Great Britain's difficulties ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... for the moon, but, in sad disillusion, Snug under Point Comfort are glad to make fast, And strive (sans our glasses) to make a confusion 'Twixt our rind of green cheese and the moon of the past; Ah, Might-have-been, Could-have-been, Would-have-been! rascals, He's a genius or fool whom ye cheat ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... which he washes down with ale and porter, seasoning his coffee, as he imagines we do in England, with gin. As time passes, and the hour of the train draws near, he begins to reflect vaguely on his project; he recalls the disillusion of the visit he had once paid to Holland. Does not a similar disillusion await him in London? 'Why travel, when one can travel so splendidly in a chair? Was he not at London already, since its odours, its atmosphere, its inhabitants, its food, its utensils, were all about him?' The train ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... of deep back gardens; but his appreciative attitude of the previous afternoon was gone, giving way to mild melancholy, such a mood as is sometimes induced by the perusal of an old romance dear to the youth of one's grandparents. The experience of the previous night had some hand in this disillusion. Some of the dissatisfaction with which it had left him still hung about his spirit, and drove him on in a vague search for diversion. He stood in front of the City Hall and watched the open cars go by, then took one, almost at random, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... say, no doubt, that this was all very well before the War, but that in the Army a little writing would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, three years ago, I ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Three years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I revered in the year 2,000 A.D. as SHAKSPEARE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... orchestral players into harmony is sufficient cause to account for the scarcity of genuine philosophical thought in this confused world. The human soul, looking desperately round for some calm yet passionate light to save its hours from ruinous waste, turns away in bitter disillusion from the thin dust and the swollen vapour that are ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... rivers, steel in a world of snow—Kelly probably already at Cumberland, and Rosecrans beyond at Wheeling—hunger, cold, winter in the spurs of the Alleghenies, disease, stragglers, weariness, worn-out shoes, broken-down horses, disappointment, disillusion, a very, very strange commanding general—Suddenly confidence, heretofore a somewhat limping attendant of the army, vanished quite away. The shrill, derisive wind, the grey wraiths of snow, the dusk of the mountains took her, conveyed her from sight, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... Yet, while inevitable disillusion had dulled his youthful dreams, its glory was never quite destroyed. It still glowed within. At times, indeed, it ran into flame, and knew something of its original splendour. Women, in particular, had helped to keep it alive, fanning ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... his thin hand upon Christian's shoulder, he said, "My friend, you have saved me. In the first shock of my disillusion I never thought of this. I think—I think there is work ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... at the girl's expression as it changed from bitter disillusion to something akin to awe, close ...
— This One Problem • M. C. Pease
... the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have at least ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... and, it seemed to her, heaven-rending passion—yea, when for her every veil seemed rent and a terrible and sacred creative darkness covered the earth—then—after all this wonder and miracle—in crept a poisonous grey snake of disillusionment, a poisonous grey snake of disillusion that bit her to madness, so that she really was ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... exclusively to the mischances of unrequited love or to the jealousies that attend adulterous love, he disregarded such puerile maladies and probed into those wounds which are more fatal, more keen and deep, which arise from satiety, disillusion and scorn in ruined souls whom the present tortures, the past fills with loathing and the future frightens and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and as the force of events will compel him to talk sense sooner or later, even without a bribe, his bargaining position is not strong. In the meantime he may make trouble. If so, it can't be helped. But it will do him no good, and may even help to bring nearer the inevitable day of disillusion. I may add that for France to agree to a short moratorium is not a great sacrifice since, on account of the Belgian priority and other items, the amount of cash to which France will be entitled in the near future, even if the payments fixed last March ...
— Essays in Liberalism - Being the Lectures and Papers Which Were Delivered at the - Liberal Summer School at Oxford, 1922 • Various
... two hearts one; but ah, my Arthur, how lonely yours is! how little you give me of it! You speak of our parting with a smile on your lip; of our meeting, and you care not to hasten it! Is life but a disillusion, then, and are the flowers of our garden faded away? I have wept—I have prayed—I have passed sleepless hours—I have shed bitter, bitter tears over your letter! To you I bring the gushing poesy of my being—the yearnings of the soul that ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... country, the child is very near to Nature's heart; he is brother to the tree and calls all the dumb, growing things by name. He is sublimely superstitious. His imagination, as yet untouched by disillusion, makes good all that earth lacks, and habited in a healthy body the ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... faces in the crowd congregated on the dock. When it became further evident that not only was Naomi de Ruyter forgotten in the city of her birth, but that the very landmarks she remembered had been swept away, there was a moment of disillusion, not ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... had conceived that she was meeting the victorious fleet of Don Miguel, returning from the destruction of the pirates. When at comparatively close quarters the pennon of St. George soared to the Arabella's masthead to disillusion her, the Santo Nino chose the better part of valour, ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... dreaminess of his musical thoughts and execution called to mind Rossini's saying of a celebrated singer, "Elle a l'air d'un elephant qui aurait avale un rossignol." One can easily imagine the surprise and disillusion of the four pupils of Zimmermann—MM. Marmontel, Prudent, A. Petit, and Chollet—who, provided with a letter of introduction by their master, called on Field soon after his arrival in Paris ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... neither saint nor hero, except in Mary's fancy sketch of the Coming Man. He remonstrates against canonization strenuously—dissent that passes with the idealist for modesty, and enhances her admiration. She is oftener to blame for the disillusion than he. With the perverseness of feminine nature she construes strength into coarseness of fibre, slowness into brutal indifference. Until women get at the truth in this matter of self-deception, disappointment surely awaits upon awakening ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... with a keen glance at the girl's flushing cheek. "Well, in one sense it is true. Love is a beautiful thing to look at—an angel to outward show—with the heart, too often, of a fiend; and it is he who leads us to that precipice of which I spoke—the precipice of disillusion and despair." ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... he was now secure on the throne of ivory and gold. A few days after he had heard the news he repeated the adventure of his boyhood; for the second time he scaled the steep hillside, and penetrated the matted brake. He expected violent disillusion, but his feeling was rather astonishment at the activity of boyish imagination. There was no terror nor amazement now in the green bulwarks, and the stunted undergrowth did not seem in any way extraordinary. Yet he did not laugh at the memory of his sensations, he was not ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... disillusioned have no convictions. Disillusion is the failure of a half-belief. I learnt that long ago. But I hate the very word in your mouth. Woe to us both if we cannot be resolute now. I could have waited—had I seen any reason to wait. Time could make no difference in my love. As it is, I have stolen you from ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... small figure walking towards her, the more necessary it became to proceed, but she felt a deadly sickness of this road. She loved each individual tree, each bush and field and the view from every point, but the whole thing she hated. It was the personification of mistake, disappointment and slow disillusion, but now it was all shrouded in darkness and she seemed to be walking on nothing, through nothing and towards nothing. She herself was nothing and she thought of nothing, though now and then a little wave of anxiety washed over her. ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... can foresee the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... whose effect is that he long remains wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... manner of uttering these last words, that it would not have required the wisdom of one older than Miss Cable to detect that he was thoroughly enjoying his pose of man of the world. He was indeed young! For, he had yet to learn that not to disillusion the girl, but to conform as much as possible to her ideals, was the surest way to win her favour; and his vanity surely would have received a blow had not David Cable at that moment come out of the doorway across the sidewalk, pausing for a moment ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... peals bursting in uncontrolled fury on this exposed peak, minimise the delights of a mountain sojourn. The invasion of an army of jungle rats, behind the walls and above the ceiling of a room sodden and dripping with the afternoon's flood, completes the disillusion, and compels a hasty descent to the warmer damp of the lowlands, for the Equatorial climate, and the general absence of bed-coverings, causes a rheumatic stiffness on rising, which has to be steamed out by the atmospheric vapour-bath of the tropical island. A long rickshaw ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... whose faces were dimly familiar to a student of illustrated papers, and men who were strange, but all men doing something in return for the good things the world had given them. Such at least was Christopher's innocent belief. Aymer did not disillusion him. ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... forth, amused him for a very short time. He became horribly bored, and when Bertha married Percy Kellynch, felt pained and particularly surprised and disappointed in her. He had always believed her to be so superior to other girls, so true and loyal! It was quite a disillusion; to think that she could get over him so easily! Women usually took much longer than that. However, he now despised himself even more as a fool than as a coward for having given up Bertha, and not being of the type who trouble to conceal their feelings in domestic ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of anticipatory disillusion. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... likeness to the chief prose realist of France, Gustave Flaubert, so far as his manner of view goes, for in point of style the two have small resemblance. One of the most striking things in Crabbe's biography is his remembrance of the gradual disillusion of a day of pleasure which, as a child, he enjoyed in a new boat of his father's. We all of us, except those who are gifted or cursed with the proverbial duck's back, have these experiences and these remembrances of them. But most men either simply ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! Happy!—in this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His friend's confidence only made ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... this image to my mind's eye that it became unnecessary for me to see the creature, and I ceased to look for him; then all at once came disillusion, when one day, hearing the familiar high-pitched laugh with its penetrating and somewhat nasal tone, I looked and beheld the thing that had laughed just leaving its perch on a branch near the ground and winging its way across the field. It was only a bird after all—only the wryneck; ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... dinner was certainly ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an old acquaintance which X. had hoped to have left in the jungle until his ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... London and when he was most depressed he had only to read a few pages to be transported into those chasing attics where Rodolphe and the rest of them danced and loved and sang. He began to think of Paris as before he had thought of London, but he had no fear of a second disillusion; he yearned for romance and beauty and love, and Paris seemed to offer them all. He had a passion for pictures, and why should he not be able to paint as well as anybody else? He wrote to Miss Wilkinson and asked her how much ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... gave her. She was exactly the sort of girl to call out a boy's love, and she had all mine, poor foolish wretch that I was. There's nothing more pathetic, I think, at this distance, than a boy's passionate purity in his first love—unless it's his disillusionment; for disillusion does no nature good. It would have done mine great harm if I hadn't had a friend like you to groan and ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... grossness. There was in him more of the Yahoo than of the decadent. There was an excremental element in his genius as in the genius of that other gloomy dean, Jonathan Swift. Donne and Swift were alike satirists born under Saturn. They laughed more frequently from disillusion than from happiness. Donne, it must be admitted, turned his disillusion to charming as well as hideous uses. Go and Catch a Falling Star is but one of a series of delightful lyrics in disparagement of women. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... was the disillusion of one who wanted to try its effects on a dog. The poor beast howled with the pain but did not present any symptom ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... he cries in the last disillusion, "is science, since this people abounding in scholars commits abominations worthy of the Huns and worse than theirs, because they are systematic, cold-blooded, voluntary, and have for an excuse, neither passion nor hunger?" And ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... tell us how tired he was and how discouraged by this lesson of disillusion following swiftly upon the finest day of his life. He told us how he went the round of all the ship-owners' offices in the City where some junior clerk would furnish him with printed forms of application which he took home ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... been divided for ever like the members of a ruined family. The windows were open, and one gave a view of the Court's watchful lamp-post, and the other of the house—now occupied by an art dealer and a commission agent—where the Duke had known both illusion and disillusion. The delicate sound of the collision of billiard-balls came from somewhere, and the rat-tatting of a tape-machine from somewhere else. The two friends had arrived at the condition of absolute wisdom and sagacity and tolerance which is apt to be achieved at a late ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the professor had opportunity he came to Coleman. He was a changed little man, and his extraordinary bewilderment showed in his face. It was the disillusion and amazement of a stubborn mind that had gone implacably in its one direction and found in the end that the direction was all wrong, and that really a certain mental machine had not been infallible. Coleman ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... which made all others seem trifling by comparison. The next moment, a new life was born into the world—a new life, with all its heritage of certain sorrow and possible joy; with all its infinite sensibility to pleasure or pain, to hope and love and disillusion. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... the sense of disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... mournfully, "It wouldn't be so bad if it was number three or four, but Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A.," a mail or so late. We never told him of Van Diemen's Avenue, nor for ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... crippled beggar, who croaked in a voice rough with frost and aguardiente his deep disillusion and distrust of ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... the subsidiary impulses, and a whole tract of life becomes inexplicably colourless. What was formerly full of zest, and so obviously worth doing that it raised no questions, has now grown dreary and purposeless: with a sense of disillusion we inquire the meaning of life, and decide, perhaps, that all is vanity. The search for an outside meaning that can compel an inner response must always be disappointed: all "meaning" must be at bottom related to our primary desires, ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... have cleared myself, had I so chosen, but only by fixing the guilt upon him. And that I could not bring myself to do, after all the kindness which I—had received at the hands of my aunt and uncle; for they not only idolised the lad but believed in him implicitly, and I knew that disillusion would simply break their hearts—they would never again be able to hold up their heads and look others in the face. Therefore when I was summoned to be tried by court martial, I simply pleaded Not Guilty—which was regarded as an aggravation of my offence— ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... life was destined to be brightened. The Aeolian Harp has no more than the moderate merits, with its full share of the characteristic faults, of his earlier productions; but one cannot help "reading into it" the poet's after-life of disappointment and disillusion—estrangement from the "beloved woman" in whose affection he was then reposing; decay and disappearance of those "flitting phantasies" with which he was then so joyously trifling, and the bitterly ironical scholia which fate was ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... fail to impress the traveller with that communicative openness and joyousness of soul which he would like to find in them, if only that he might not have the vexation of convicting himself of laying up for his own fancy another disillusion. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... grace of speech, her very voice was the deep bass of a man. In the days of her joyous entrance into London, amid the acclamations of the populace, her high spirit, her kind heart, and the excitement of adventure lent a passing glow to her sallow cheeks. But ill-health and disillusion followed. She became morbid and sullen, sometimes remaining for days in a dull stupor, at other times giving way to gusts of hysterical passion. But beneath her forbidding exterior there beat a warm, tender, womanly heart, which yearned for some one to love and ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... great astonishment of the world which, even then, hesitates to recognize in that access of folly the proof, the blow, more formidable, more instantaneous in its ravages, than those of love-sudden disillusion. When the disaster is not interrupted by acts of violence, it causes an irreparable destruction of the youthfulness of the soul, it is the idea instilled in us forever that all can betray, since we have been betrayed in ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... some grave wrong, and that I know their guilt. Having lost confidence in their own and other people's words, they revere my silence, even as people revere every silence and every mystery. If I were to start to speak suddenly, I would again become human to them and would disillusion them bitterly, no matter what I would say; in my silence I am to them like their eternally silent God. For these strange people would cease believing their God as soon as their God would commence to speak. Their women are already regarding me as a saint. And the kneeling ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... a terrible thing to have to disillusion her, but it was something now that had to be done. Kennedy had not sought to do so. He had postponed it in the hope of finding some other way. But now the ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... keep a strict watch over himself will be able to escape the causes of disillusion, which lead us through fatal paths of error, to ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... it was a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in the actuality ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... it, the immense barn on the corner opposite, and the wheat- and corn-fields waving in the distance, caused many a passer-by to envy the possessors; but a look at the interior of the house and only a brief acquaintance with the occupants were sufficient to disillusion any one regarding the family's culture ...
— The Poorhouse Waif and His Divine Teacher • Isabel C. Byrum
... Dr. Jennings very little and that chiefly medical. There is, however, a sort of code that answers instead of language frequently, when two or three women of later middle life are gathered together, a code born of mutual understanding, mutual disillusion, mutual distrust, a language of outspread hands, raised eyebrows, portentous shakings of the head. Frau Schwarz, on the edge of Peter's tub-shaped bed, needed no English to convey the fact that Peter was a bad lot. Not that she resorted only to the ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... with such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... two voices, a young one, full of soft southern inflections, and an older voice, a trifle hard, as from disillusion. ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... It rains. The Tarasconese hero salutes the Ashes. The truth about William Tell. Disillusion. Tartarin of Tarascon ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... could settle to nothing till he had seen her again; there was a curious jealousy in his heart about Ashton; he would have given anything he possessed to be able to disillusion her, but knew it was impossible ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... while I am Secretary of State, and I believe there will be no war so long as I live." It has not come out that way; it might have so easily come out that way if only Germany had signed that treaty of his! But he is not disillusioned; nothing can disillusion him; his ideal is still only a day or two ahead of him, and he resigns to fight for it, since fight for it in the Cabinet ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Barklay attempted to reason with him, he responded with respectful humour. He had seen victory slip within his grasp, and slip out of it, so often that he was on the verge of complete demoralization, but he thought that he alone was aware of it, and because of his pride, Anna didn't disillusion him. ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... The everyday young German believes firmly that it was a blow aimed specially at Germany; that no such regulation affected any goods but German goods. And the English, with their characteristic heedlessness, have never troubled to disillusion him. But even the British caricaturist and the British soldier betray their fundamental opinion of the matter in their very insults. They will not use a word of abuse for the Germans as Germans; they call them "Huns," because ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... European fashion and at twenty had married and lost the young nobleman whose name she bore, and had buried him in his family crypt in Moscow with the simple fortitude of one who is well out of a bad bargain. But she had paid her toll to disillusion and the age of thirty found her a little more careless, a little more worldly-wise than was necessary, even in a cosmopolitan. Her comments spared neither friend nor foe and Hilda Ashhurst, whose mind grasped only the obvious facts of existence, came in for more than a ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... "She's another disillusion. She's idle and dirty. And Potifer never does a stroke of work if he can help it. Moral—don't bother your head about martyrs. There's generally some excellent reason ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the poet Eglamor, whom Sordello foils and subdues in the contest of song. The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully—and yet with a difference—in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion in worldliness, Sordello again seeks solitude, and ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... reproduction of a new song, or a mystification of a great modern, careless of fame and scornful of his time? Could it be possible that in the eleventh century, so far away as Khorassan, so accomplished a man of letters lived, with such distinction, such breadth, such insight, such calm disillusion, such cheerful and jocund despair? Was this Weltschmerz, which we thought a malady of our day, endemic in Persia in 1100? My doubt lasted only till I came upon a literal translation of the Rubaiyat, and I saw that not the least remarkable quality of Fitzgerald's was its fidelity to the original. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... air of disappointment and disillusion). Down't awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn's naow ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... laughter followed this attack—laughter which found a smothered echo among the ghosts. The spell was broken; disillusion followed the exquisite thrill of fear; and all Lady Sarah's male visitors made a rush upon the guilty nun. The loose white robe was stripped off, and little Jerry Spavinger, gentleman jock, famous on the Heath, and at Doncaster, stood revealed, in his shirt and breeches, and those light riding-boots ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes and dances of ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... ordinary enough, and from the others I had no account so full and personal and true as from Markovitch. He told me all about that great day afterwards, only a short time before that catastrophe that overwhelmed us all, and in his account there was all the growing suspicion and horror of disillusion that after-events fostered in him. But as he told me, sitting through the purple hours of the night, watching the light break in ripples and circles of colour over the sea, he regained some of the splendours of that great day, and before ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... not, therefore, enlist under Garibaldi. A tenacious loyalty to the memory of ideas I had once served would always prevent me from more actively attacking them, or from desecrating their graves. Moreover, the revulsion of feeling consequent upon my disillusion was so tremendous, that I was swept entirely out of the region of the questions at issue, and both sides became indifferent to me, both camps dim ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... big chair, removing his feet from the railing. He was in his shirt- sleeves, and was smoking a pipe. The droop of his thin mustache matched the droop of his thin shoulders—and both indefinably but unmistakably spelled disillusion and discouragement. "It's grand, but I think it's too grand—for us. However, daughter says the best is none too ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... thither with lightning speed, now over the social events of the last six weeks—now over incidents of those long-past holidays. Was this, indeed, the second volume beginning—the natural sequel to those old mysterious histories of shrinking, disillusion, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a tactful diversion, rose and began to collect plates. The meal was at an end, and for Mrs. Maldon it had closed in ignominy. From her quarter of the table she pushed crockery towards Rachel with a gesture of disillusion; the courage to smile had been but momentary. She felt old—older than she had ever felt before. The young generation presented themselves to her as almost completely enigmatic. She admitted that they were foreign to her, that she ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... at first is full of disillusion. It has offered abundant material to the idealist who, as might be expected, has drawn of it a picture which is at once common and pretentious. Your idealist can see no beauty in sober fact, but must array it in all the theatrical properties of a vulgar imagination; he must give to things more ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... on those terms—she owes him money. If for love—she owes him at least the outside observances of love. If he has pretended love and it is for some other motive, his Nemesis will fall upon himself in the disillusion and contempt he will inspire. But in all cases the woman, through want of intelligence or pure misfortune, has crossed the Rubicon with him; she has allowed him to teach her the meaning of dual life—she has put it into his ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... opportunity of putting his ideas into practice. So far as our meagre traditions allow us to trace the development of the two, the differences are even more fundamental. Peaceful as was the latter part of Gotama's life, the beginning was a period of struggle and disillusion. He broke away from worldly life to study philosophy: he broke away from philosophy to wear out his body with the severest mortification; that again he found to be vanity and only then did he attain to enlightenment. And though he offers salvation to all without ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... of faith and hope. The generous ardour and the splendid humanitarian enthusiasms which had been stirred by the opening phases of the revolutionary movement, had now ebbed away; revulsion had followed, and with it the mood of disillusion and despair. The spirit of doubt and denial was felt as a paralysing power in every department of life and thought, and the shadow of unbelief lay ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... that Otto Kahn sees eye to eye with me. The utter degradation of the fine old Germany by Prussia was a bitter disillusion of my young manhood. What must it have been to Otto Kahn? He loved the old Germany to which he was "linked by ties of blood, by fond memories and cherished sentiments." To cast her out of his soul—to range himself in the forefront of those fighting the abomination which had made her an outcast ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... disagreeable visits, he saw Cornelia and Hyde coming up Broadway together. They were sauntering side by side in all the lazy happiness of perfect love; and as he looked at them the sorrow of an immense disillusion filled him to the lips. He had believed himself, as yet, to be the first and the dearest in his child's love; but in that moment his eyes were opened, and he felt as if he had been suddenly thrust out from it and ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... inference himself; yet it must show itself to be strictly an inference from the story—the story must not seem to have been constructed to prove it. "Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht," wrote Schiller; even so, the delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of disillusion, monotony, repression—life's generous impulses narrowed and made timid by the social, economic, and political machine—would be a criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing. This the Russian novelists seem to have understood; ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... earth puts forth her blossoms anew, since the bird builds its nest, and the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be men, and commit the rest to Him who has numbered the stars. For my part, I would I might find glowing words to say to whomsoever has lost heart in these times of disillusion: Rouse your courage, hope on; he is sure of being least deluded who has the daring to do that; the most ingenuous hope is nearer truth ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... a disillusion! Say, wilt thou that we woo her, double-handed? Wilt thou that we two woo her, both together? Feel'st thou, passing from my leather doublet, Through thy laced doublet, all my ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... a tale as exists in the realm of pure romance. Unlike its great successor, the 'Yankee at King Arthur's Court', it never sacrifices the illusion to the burlesque, while through it all there runs a delicate vein of humor. Only here and there is there the slightest disillusion, and this mainly in the use of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... bitter self-analysis; the end with the more sensitive or the less durable is dissipation or even death. Woe to him who places his faith in illusion—the only reality—and woe to him who does not. In one way lies disillusion with its pain, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... its promise. Of hunger and want there was an end. On the bed, stretched at full length, with his Grand Army hat flung beside him, lay the inventor, dead. A little round hole in the temple, from which a few drops of blood had flowed, told what remained of his story. In the night disillusion had come, with failure. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise of Napoleon. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... produce a sinister effect. For the rest any kind word about The Return (and there have been such words said at different times) awakens in me the liveliest gratitude, for I know how much the writing of that fantasy has cost me in sheer toil, in temper and in disillusion. ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... not the heart to disillusion him of the notion that there could be something delightful apart from her, and so ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... four-storied brick dwelling on Twenty-seventh Street. As they looked from the outside, they were afraid that the price of staying in such a place would be too much for their pockets. Inside, the sight of the hard, gaudily upholstered instalment-plan furniture did not disillusion them, and they continued to fear that they could never stop at this fine place. But they found Mrs. Jones, the proprietress, both gracious and willing to come to terms ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... to flatter me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing a wall when the sentry's back was turned, ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... "Here is a card to a nice doctor, Phineas Benton, M.D. I have not seen him in years; he remembers me as I was. You will not, of course, disillusion him. I've had to lie to him about you—and about myself. I've told him that I know your family in Philadelphia, that they asked me about the chances of a position here for you as an assistant in a physician's office, and that now you had come on to seek ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... a very gradual disillusion, and one mitigated by many experiences that had fully justified even Sophy's extravagant anticipations. The trouble, in the main, was one common to a great majority of travellers for pleasure—a mind totally unprepared for ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... father simply perfect," was Mrs. Wells's reply. "I dread to think what it will cost her when disillusion comes, as come it must. Why! Who is that he is ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... upbringing, I can realise the poor, pretty weak-willed baby of a thing that was her mother, taking the line of least resistance, the husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom and joyousness for women; but four years have elapsed ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... days after this rather bitter disillusion, an apprentice brought Christophe the following laconic ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... Cornelius, whom disillusion had stricken into speechlessness at this revelation of the old Ned under the masquerade, sighed heavily and looked pained. But Philip, always curious upon ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... even tried to find the right wife for him among the families of the surrounding clergy. His step was sometimes quite springy when he left the Spittal; but Grizel's shadow was always waiting for him somewhere on the way home, to take the life out of him, and after that it was again, oh, sorrowful disillusion! oh, world gone gray! Grizel did not admire him. T. Sandys was no longer a wonder to Grizel. He went home to that as surely as the ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... himself like some blasted pine, a thunder-riven trunk, tottering on the brink of the abyss, whilst far below rave the darkness and the storm-drift of the worlds. From what causes and by the operation of what laws has the great disillusion fallen upon the heart of Europe? Whither are vanished the glorious hopes with which the century opened? Is it final despair, this mood in which it closes, or is it but the temporary eclipse which hides some mightier hope, a new incarnation of the spirit of the world, some yet serener ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... cooked, do one great good," and then added after the necessary pause and with a gesture half of offering and half of disdain: "But who can call them well cooked if the tinning of the pot has been neglected?" And into this last phrase he added notes which hinted of sadness and of disillusion. It was ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... whispered about that her sister, the mother of Ivan, had been married when she was herself a child scarce out of arms. But he wondered to find how very few of his aunt's intimates remembered the age of her daughter, now for many years convent-wrapped. His first moment of disillusion came on the day that his aunt informed him, with considerable asperity, that his pretty cousin was not a person to be mentioned in their circle—the reason given—that "she was not yet out,"—sounding rather flimsy even to his ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... not wish to speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... too continuous and interesting to need elaborate argument, for nobody is likely to miss any important link in it. But Balzac has nowhere excelled in finesse and success of analysis, the double disillusion which introduces itself at once between Madame de Bargeton and Lucien, and which makes any redintegratio amoris of a valid kind impossible, because each cannot but be aware that the other has anticipated ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... sky of Paris and its cold light the disillusion began. Determined to settle down, to receive, to give entertainments, the Nabob had brought his wife over with the idea of setting her at the head of the establishment; but when he saw the arrival of that display of gaudy draperies of Palais-Royal jewelry, and all the strange ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... rarely. It is hard to build up new on an old friendship when in that friendship there has been bitter disillusion. They did their best, both these women to be friends, but they were never able to again touch one another nearly. There were too many things between them that they could not speak of, things that had never been explained nor yet forgiven. The ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... departed darkness the shadows remain, more mysterious because as if more enduring; and one feels a dread of them from which one was free before. What if they were to be victorious at the last? They, or what perhaps lurks in them: fear, deception, desire, disillusion—all silent at first before the song of triumphant love vibrating in the light. Yes. Silent. Even desire itself! All silent. But not ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had been ready to rush to him, to succor and forgive, but he had not called upon her. Now in her great need, she was calling ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... him a good and kind magician when we were children," was Hadria's thought, "and now one is grown up, there is no disillusion. He is a good ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... molto furore quickly following. Every musical term, adjectival, substantival, occurs to us as we read the thousand and odd pages of the two volumes. . . . Nothing in his fiction or any other, records a love greatening as the tedious years wore on, a love sovereignly overcoming doubt, despair and disillusion, such a love as the great Balzac's ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... were that she ought to die, that she had failed and that her disillusion as to Marty had been directly brought about by herself. She saw it all honestly and made no attempt to hedge. By day, she sat quietly, big-eyed, amazingly childlike, waiting for her punishment, watched by the practical old woman, ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... But let's begin at the beginning. My father was a fairly wealthy man—but a dreamer. He made his money by a clever invention and lost it by an investment little short of idiotic. Like many unpractical men he had rather fancied himself as a man of business and the disillusion killed him. He—shot himself. My mother, my sister and myself were left, with nothing save a small sum in the bank and the deed of the modest house we lived in. Adela was twenty-one and I was nineteen. We sold ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... knew that a "giant" was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible means could he have imagined a person sitting down to invent in cold blood for the amusement of others ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... that began on January 18 was bound to disillusion a great many people, including President Wilson himself. Principles had to be translated into practice, and every effort to do so left one party to the dispute, if not both, convinced that the principles had been betrayed. ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... often called a pessimist, for his "heavy sadness of disillusion"; but he is never bitter. Finding the universe incomprehensible, he stands baffled and passive, with a tender sympathy, almost an envy, for those who still have faith. He is above all interesting as a sane and characteristic product of the latest social conditions. His is the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... de la Rochfoucauld who says: 'Absence deepens great passions and lessens little ones just as the wind puts out the candle and heightens the fire.' This is fine from the literary point of view, but is it true? My experience says No. Yet during the absence this aphorism seems true enough. Disillusion comes with reunion. Who does not remember that first departure of the Beloved—the innumerable letters, the endless meditation, the ceaseless yearning and the everlasting planning for the glorious return? What a meeting that is going to be! How one dwells in thought on that first ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... tuneless singing; she guessed that it was assisting in the process of shaving, for she heard a few "damns" peppering the song, which suggested that his shaky hand was wielding the razor badly. And with the song came pity that swamped disgust and disillusion. It seemed so sad to her that, when hope dawned upon him, he should celebrate it by singing a piece of sentimental, however haunting, doggerel. To go there and tell him that she, too, was going to break promises, to change ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... mean the triumphal progress,’ he answered. ‘I thought you understood! We always organize one for the “stars” who visit Venice. The men who carried your chair last night were the waiters from the hotels. We hire them on account of their dress clothes’! Think of the disillusion,” added Calvé, laughing, “and my disgust, when I thought of myself naïvely throwing kisses and flowers to a group of Swiss garçons at fifteen francs a head. There was nothing to do, however, but pay the bill and ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... line between Disraeli's genial declamation and his practice when in office. It is sufficient to say that the one effort founded upon the principles of Bolingbroke ended in disaster; and that his own last reflections express a bitter disillusion at the result of the event which he looked to as the inauguration ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... after the necessary pause and with a gesture half of offering and half of disdain: "But who can call them well cooked if the tinning of the pot has been neglected?" And into this last phrase he added notes which hinted of sadness and of disillusion. ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... accurate record of my own impressions, all the drudgery, gossip, quarrels, arguments, events and experiences it contains would have to be set against a background of that extraordinary vitality which obstinately persists in Moscow even in these dark days of discomfort, disillusion, pestilence, starvation ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... on that portrait has Simon Perkins studied with exceeding diligence and care, marvelling, it must be confessed, at the taste of the Fairy Queen. The accessories to his own composition are in rapid progress. Most of the fairies have been put in, and the gradual change from glamour to disillusion, cunningly conveyed by a stream of cold grey morning light entering the magic cavern from realms of upper earth, to deaden the glitter, pale the colouring, and strip, as it were, the tinsel where it strikes. On the Rhymer himself our artist has bestowed ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... a new sound on the stairs, and swiftly, instantly, instead of glancing to the entrance, her eyes sought Ranjoor Singh's; and she saw that he had heard it too. So she sat up as if enlightenment had come and had brought disillusion in its wake. ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... the less said about my connection with Master Willie the better. Our colleagues are already restless at what they consider my neglect of my professional work. They attribute it to the wiles of Nur-el-Din. They may if they like and I don't propose to disillusion them. You ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... interpreted to mean that Pascal was really and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... will be understood how terrible disillusion on such a scale can be. I had been thinking of the United States for so long as the home of the free and the easy that it was hard to bring myself to the belief that the police there were both peremptory and severe. I had thought them all Irishmen of the ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... result, and yet all were, in their way, affected by the sudden fall of mental temperature. Mr. Denning went to his library and took out his private ledger, a penitential sort of reading which he relished after moods of any kind of enjoyment. Mrs. Denning selected Ethel Rawdon for her text of disillusion. She "thought Ethel had been a little jealous of Dora's dress," and Dora said, "It was one of her surprises, and Ethel thought she ought to know everything." "You are too obedient to Ethel," continued Mrs. Denning and Dora looked with a charming demureness at her lover, ...
— The Man Between • Amelia E. Barr
... into the lives of others, struggled with their struggles, triumphed in their triumphs, and was beginning to see in everything, good or bad, its necessity of existence. Under ordinary circumstances one cannot see much misery without experiencing a world of disillusion and futile rebellion of spirit; but Ruth was not living just at that time ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... the kitchen in time to hear the question, and Rick almost hated to give the answer, knowing that it would disillusion them, and ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... of a number. As Bill had remarked mournfully, "It wouldn't be so bad if it was number three or four, but Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A.," a mail or so late. We never told him of Van Diemen's Avenue, nor for that matter ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... after her kind, felt the bitterness of disillusion. She had believed that my wild poet's passion for her would make me her slave; and that, being her slave, I should execute her will in all things. With the essential shallowness of a negative, unimaginative ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... against McVay, who could drag her through such a mire. He felt the tragedy of a high-minded woman tricked out in stolen finery, and remembered with a pang that he himself was hurrying on the moment of disillusion. ...
— The Burglar and the Blizzard • Alice Duer Miller
... never have a disillusion! Say, wilt thou that we woo her, double-handed? Wilt thou that we two woo her, both together? Feel'st thou, passing from my leather doublet, Through thy laced ...
— Cyrano de Bergerac • Edmond Rostand
... my explanation may disillusion you but it has always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my friend Watson or from any one who might take an intelligent interest in them. But, first, as I am rather shaken by the knocking about which I had in the dressing-room, ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... dock. When it became further evident that not only was Naomi de Ruyter forgotten in the city of her birth, but that the very landmarks she remembered had been swept away, there was a moment of disillusion, not free from tears. ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... always close to his creature, Billy McLoughlin, heard of it. To him it presented another idea.20 To him it offered a chance to overthrow a political enemy and a hated rival for Miss Ashton's hand. Perhaps into the bargain it would disgust her with politics, disillusion her, and shake her faith in what he believed to be some of her 'radical' notions. All could be gained at one blow. They say that a check-book knows no politics, but Bennett has learned some, I venture to say, and to save his reputation ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... things nothing is more false than the glamour of Evil, for when on being drawn into it we sin, instead of the hoped-for delight we soon find satiety; instead of exhilaration, fatigue; instead of contentment, disillusion; instead of satisfaction, dust; instead of romance, the greedy claws of the harpy; and the further we go in response to this glamour the more pitiable our outlook; for the sweets and possibilities of Evil are extraordinarily limited. Can any ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... surprised me very unpleasantly, Lydia. I do not think now that I ever had much hope of success; but I thought, at least, that my disillusion would ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... next morning, the tracts in her hand and zeal in her heart. At the very first saloon, she was doomed to disillusion. ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... not, would not the loss be most irreparable and bitter? Would it not be better to go away, having looked at it from the hill and having heard the saga of the firs, keeping his memory of it unblurred, than risk the probable disillusion of a return to the places that had forgotten him and friends whom the varying years must certainly have changed as he had changed himself? No, he would not go down. It had been a foolish whim to come at all—foolish, ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... at his disillusion. The young apostle was jostled out of sight in the bustle of the growing town. There was no room in it for idealists who were diffident and sensitive and stood on the outside of its self-absorbed activity bewildered by the noises of life. The stream of events was very different from the pages ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... builds its nest, and the mother smiles at her child, let us have the courage to be men, and commit the rest to Him who has numbered the stars. For my part, I would I might find glowing words to say to whomsoever has lost heart in these times of disillusion: Rouse your courage, hope on; he is sure of being least deluded who has the daring to do that; the most ingenuous hope is nearer truth than the ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... attitude of the previous afternoon was gone, giving way to mild melancholy, such a mood as is sometimes induced by the perusal of an old romance dear to the youth of one's grandparents. The experience of the previous night had some hand in this disillusion. Some of the dissatisfaction with which it had left him still hung about his spirit, and drove him on in a vague search for diversion. He stood in front of the City Hall and watched the open cars go by, then took one, almost at random, that bore the label of Evergreen Park. As soon as ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... was a man fifty feet high; the cutting open of the giant—it occurred in her version—pleased him immensely. Then when she had finished she was alarmed to find, from words dropped by him, that he considered the story to be true, or at least to be taken seriously. She did not disillusion him; to do so she would have had to tell him that she had lied. That was the funny part of the thing. He would have said to himself "what made her lie to me about that chap?" By no possible means could he have imagined ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... been educated according to the European fashion and at twenty had married and lost the young nobleman whose name she bore, and had buried him in his family crypt in Moscow with the simple fortitude of one who is well out of a bad bargain. But she had paid her toll to disillusion and the age of thirty found her a little more careless, a little more worldly-wise than was necessary, even in a cosmopolitan. Her comments spared neither friend nor foe and Hilda Ashhurst, whose mind grasped ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... dreamy echoes concerning them, will not be for himself. You may think him, that philosophic archon or king, who in consenting to be your master has really taken upon himself "the form of a servant"—you may think him, in our late age of philosophic disillusion, a wholly chimerical being. Yet history records one instance in which such a figure actually found his way to an imperial throne, and with a certain approach to the result Plato promises. It was precisely because his whole being was filled with philosophic ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Disgrace malhonori. Disguise alivesti. Disgust nauxzi. Dish plado. Dishcloth telertuko. Dishearten malkuragxigi. Dishonest malhonesta. Dishonesty malhonesteco. Dishonour malhonori. Dishonourable malhonora. Disillusion elrevigxo. Disinfect dezinfekti. Disinterested malprofitema. Disjoin disligi. Disjoint elartikigi. Disjunction disigo. Dislike malsxati, malameti. Dislike antipatio. Dislocate elartikigi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, "Too bad!" or, "I don't see how you keep- up?" and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hardly less true, if we accept the word in its modern meaning. Raleigh's most notable verses, The Lie, are a challenge to the world, inspired by indignant pride and the weariness of life—the saeva indignatio of Swift. The same grave and caustic melancholy, the same disillusion marks his quaint poem, The Pilgrimage. It is remarkable how many of the verses among his few poetical remains are asserted in the MSS. or by tradition to have been "made by Sir Walter {89} Raleigh the night before he was ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... me, don't you? Never mind; let us pretend I'm Major Grim disguised as an Arab; only, I'm afraid we must continue the conversation in Arabic; I might disillusion you if I tried to talk English. We'll say then that I'm Major Grim, disguised. Let's see now... What would he do in the circumstances? Here's Yussuf Dakmar, wanted for murder in the city and known to be plotting a massacre, seen climbing a wall when the sentry's back was turned, and caught ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... Yet as time went on she could not shut her eyes to Sydney's habit of referring every question to the test of personal expediency. It was her first great disillusion, but the pain which it caused her was on her parents' behalf rather than on her own. They were the chief sufferers; they gave him so much and received so little in return. To be sure, Sydney was only what they had made him. They bade ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... remark: "Dear me! How stuffy this room is, and the shop's practically full of trash!" Or, some little time before they are dead, they stay later than usual in the shop one evening, and make up their minds to take stock and count the till, and the disillusion lays them low, and they struggle into the living-room and murmur: "I shall never have that beautiful furniture, and I shall never have that system of ventilation. If I had known earlier, I would have ...
— Mental Efficiency - And Other Hints to Men and Women • Arnold Bennett
... I won't believe it! It's no good trying to disillusion me, Charmion. I've put you on a topmost pinnacle, and it would take a mighty effort to tumble ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... figure walking towards her, the more necessary it became to proceed, but she felt a deadly sickness of this road. She loved each individual tree, each bush and field and the view from every point, but the whole thing she hated. It was the personification of mistake, disappointment and slow disillusion, but now it was all shrouded in darkness and she seemed to be walking on nothing, through nothing and towards nothing. She herself was nothing and she thought of nothing, though now and then a little wave of anxiety washed over her. Where ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed with angry surprise and disillusion: ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... mean to give it to me?" I said. "I should like to have it very much. I should set it up on my writing table and call it 'Disillusion.' But do you think it ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... into the hands of traitors, eloquent liars, and vile hypocrites, and cannot escape without crawling in the dust—this produces a large deep gloom, and a crushing sense of doom beyond philosophy. Scudamore could have endured the loss and the disillusion of his love—pure and strong as that power had been—but the ruin of his native land would turn his lively heart into a ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... certainly ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an old acquaintance which X. had hoped to have left in the jungle until his return. This, and other ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... suddenly at the duke, and the elder man winced at the expression in his face. He looked through the duke, through his veiled despair and disillusion, beyond him. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... his dramas gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness, the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and "Measure for Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and foulness that underlie so much of human life, a loss of the old frank trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Caesar" ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Anyone who believed Metamorphizer had salesappeal just wasnt all there. But why should I disillusion her and wound her pride? Down underneath her rough exterior I supposed she could be as sensitive as I; and I hope ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... stars and the pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling her very trust ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... full of brighter promise. There is something very touching, to us older men almost tragical, in the unbounded self- confidence of the young life that we see rushing to the front all round us. We know so well the disillusion that is sure to come, the disappointments that will cloud the morning sky. We would not carry one shadow from the darkened experience of middle life into the roseate tints of the morning. The ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... I wrestled with a memory Which knocked insurgent at the gates of thought. The crumbled wreck of years behind has wrought Its disillusion; now I only cry For peace, for power to forget the lie Which hope too long has whispered. So I sought The sleep which would not come, and night was fraught With old emotions weeping silently. I heard your voice again, and knew the things Which you had promised proved an empty vaunt. I felt your ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... inquiry, I arrive at the place, make my peace with the gardener, and enter. My disillusion dates from the opening of the garden door. I repine, I find a reluctation of spirit against believing that this is the place. What, is this kailyard that inexhaustible paradise of a garden in which M—— and I found "elbow-room," and expatiated together without sensible constraint? ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... revolting, loathsome, horrible; but it was too manifest to be overlooked or ignored; its vulgarity and horror forced it on her attention. For some time she stood spell-bound, paralyzed; but then she covered her face with her hands; maidenly shame, bitter disillusion, and pious indignation at the gross desecration of all that she deemed most sacred and inviolable surged up in her stricken soul, and she burst into tears, weeping as she had never wept in all her life before. Sobbing bitterly, she wrapped her face in her veil, as though to protect ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... beauties are not the rose-coloured exaggerations of memory? Are not time and distance lending their proverbial enchantment?" In fact, as I set sail to revisit England, the spring before last, it was in some such mood of anticipatory disillusion. ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... who, abandoning the deductive construction of intellectual theorems, made an exhaustive study of the Chartist movement. It is greatly to be regretted that these lectures were not effectively published. Their delivery wrought a tremendous disillusion as to the novelty of our ideas and methods of propaganda; much new gospel suddenly appeared to us as stale failure; and we recognized that there had been weak men before Agamemnon, even as far back as in Cromwell's army. ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... really developed so successfully as it might have done; many believe that it finds itself in a cul-de-sac. But what is to be done? The experienced can see that many of the offered reforms are but the repetition of old mistakes which will involve us in the unhappy cycle of disillusion and failure. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if men everywhere are seeking for a sign, a glimpse of a scheme of life, a view of reality, a hint of human destiny and the true outcome of human effort, to be an inspiration and a guide to them ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... shook his head. It seemed to him at that moment as if he never could eat or sleep again, the disillusion was so bitter, his disappointment ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... author is well within his rights. But if he prefers unmitigated gloom in his representations of life, we on our part have the right of not taking him too seriously. Speaking of disillusion, two can play at that game. We must get over our too romantic attitude toward literature. We must not exaggerate the significance of what is presented to us, and treat that which is of necessity partial as if it were universal. When we are presented with a poor and shabby world, peopled ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... Promise. The book is the history of how they got on there. Naturally, from the circumstances of their start and the giddy altitude of Alberta's hopes, you will be prepared for its being, to some extent at least, a story of disillusion. Miss MADGE S. SMITH, who wrote it, says that it is all true; and indeed there is much in the tale that stamps it as the outcome of personal experience. This being so, I could wish that her attitude in the matter had been a little less uncompromisingly English. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 26th, 1914 • Various
... ready to tear to pieces, allowing them neither intelligence nor virtue—in just that there seemed to her some flaw of taste that was almost like a confession of failure. Surely she loved him, and was ready to forgive him much: not for worlds would she have confessed to disillusion. And yet, now and again, when the rush and ostentation of their new life, with its monotony of dinners and dances—so little like that which she had anticipated as the future lot of a painter's wife—had left ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... it for a while." Again Mark had put back the thought of his heart. Like so many of the loyal and devoted, he could hardly bring himself to speak of his own deeper motives and ambitions. Least of all could he reveal them in this moment of disillusion. He had never told Bertram about the four-act comedy hidden in the writing desk of their common room, to be mulled over during the mornings of his leisure. "I think I'll stay with it for a ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the climes, the fears as the hopes, all the travail of deepest, fullest living, we claim as our own forever. We guard jealously our heritage of feeling. Would you for all the world sleep rather than wake, forget rather than remember? Then cease the requiem of your speech about the dangers of disillusion! ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... who insists upon mistaking you for the heir of all the Rothschilds used to cost me dear when I was younger. I find the best plan is to take him in hand at the beginning and disillusion him; sweep aside his talk of '84 Perrier Jouet, followed by a '79 Chateau Lafite, and ask him, as man to man, if he can conscientiously recommend the Saint Julien at two-and-six. After that he settles down to his work and ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... whose sympathy with the spiritual life of their respective nations was still a living force. It would seem, however, to be the natural reaction produced by a tremendous national calamity, under which the mainspring of the collective mind temporarily gives way and the psychical equilibrium is upset. Disillusion, despondency, and contempt for the passions that lately stirred them drive the people to seek relief in the distractions of pleasures, among which dancing is perhaps one of the mildest. It was so in Paris at the close of the long period of stress which ended with the rise of Napoleon. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... disappointment which this produced was greater than the Painters' Union could bear; so someone, in order to prevent industrial strife, invented some stuff called varnish, by which, at the very moment of disillusion, the maximum of shininess can be again produced with the minimum of effort. It is one of the few inventions which make a man grateful for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... face to face, and made acquainted, with her who for so long had seemed the object of a romantic passion, he felt a strange thrill of surprise and embarrassment. Those meetings of later years generally bring painful disillusion. How many of us can remember some fair-haired little girl who in our childhood represented to us the very incarnation of feminine grace and beauty, for whom we fetched and carried, for whom we bound nosegays on the heath and stole apples from the ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... quieter type of man who had no real love for the pomps and shows the rattle and tumult, of the city. The vision of wholesome country-produce—of fresh milk and eggs and vegetables, and of tender poultry—is one which still attracts our city-folk. But the vision, then as now, was often subject to disillusion. Complaints are many that you had to feed the homestead in place of it feeding you, and when Martial has given a pleasant picture of a family reaching the gate of Rome with a coachful of the typical produce of the country, he ends by suddenly letting you know that ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... such confidence that Oliver had a difficulty in choosing the words that were to disillusion him. Therefore he ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... soul aflame with hope and eagerness and tremulous joy, ready to burst into a blaze of happiness—and then came disillusion and despair, blacker ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... really the man who had made her suffer, weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust, far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... studying the exquisite delicacy of the face turned so wistfully upon him, and the lovely lines of the slim throat and rounded chin—"So beautiful a creature"—he was saying within himself—"And must she also suffer pain and disillusion like all the rest of her unfortunate ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... Thus disillusion had been her misfortune—perhaps it would be more accurate to say her fortune. She had built up, after each invasion, her defences more carefully and solidly than before, only to be again astonished and dismayed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... But the spiritual disillusion had come at last, and it had revealed him to himself at an awful depth of self-deception. Thinking in his pride and arrogance he was the divine messenger, the avenger, the man of God, he had set out to shed blood like any wretched criminal, any jealous murderer who was ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... found and well named. I own to that kind of candour you attribute to me: when I am frankly interested, I suppose I fancy the public will be so too; and when I am moved, I am sure of it. It has been my luck hitherto to meet with no staggering disillusion. 'Before' and 'After' may be two; and yet I believe the habit is now too thoroughly ingrained to be altered. About the doctors, you were right, that dedication has been the subject of some pleasantries that made me grind, and of your happily touched reproof which ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in their Italian models. The Petit Jehan de Saintre is certainly the work of Antoine de la Salle; the irony of a realist, endowed with subtlety and grace, conducts the reader through chivalric exaltations to vulgar disillusion. The writer was not insensible to the charm of the ideals of the past, but he presents them only in the end to cover them with disgrace. The anonymous farce of Pathelin, and the Chronique de petit Jehan de Saintre, are perhaps the most ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... doubt, that this was all very well before the War, but that in the Army a little writing would be a pleasant change after the day's duties. Allow me to disillusion you. If, three years ago, I ever conceived a glorious future in which my autograph might be of value to the more promiscuous collectors, that conception has now been shattered. Three years in the Army has absolutely spoilt the market. Even were I revered in the year 2,000 A.D. as SHAKSPEARE ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 28, 1917 • Various
... an air of disappointment and disillusion). Down't awsk me, Miste Jornsn. The kepn's naow clawss ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... all Spain. Unaccustomed to manual labour, ignorant of the simplest principles of mining, poorly supplied—when at all—with the necessary implements, they rushed to the mines with but scanty provision even of food; fevers seized them, strange diseases attacked them—most of all, disillusion confronted them; out of Ovando's 2500 men more than one thousand died within a brief period, in the most wretched manner. Those who had the courage and strength to work, barely made enough to feed themselves, for it not infrequently happened that after the royal fifth was ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... in this hour of disillusion and humiliation that she turned for solace to de Cosse, whose touching constancy at last found its reward. It was not long before friendship ripened into a love as ardent as his own; and for the first time this fickle beauty, whose heart ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... wounded and bruised, and sometimes disabled for life. The test is severe and dangerous. In the course of it the mental and moral equilibrium is affected, and runs the risk of not being re-established. Too sudden and complete disillusion has supervened. The deceptions have been too great, the disappointments ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... was something which he had himself foreseen. He had never really accepted Spence's theory that early disillusion had seriously poisoned the lifesprings natural to her age. Her awakening had been certain. He had warned Spence that she would wake! He felt all the exultation of a prophet who sees his prophecy fulfilled. But common sense urged caution. To frighten her now might ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... flesh, of his blood; when she knew she would not wholly condemn him . . . No, no! He could not. She honored and trusted him now; she had placed him on so high a pedestal that it was utterly impossible for him to disillusion her young mind, to see for ever and ever the mute reproach in her honest eyes, to feel that though his arm encircled her she was beyond his reach.... God knew that he could not tell this child of the black gulf he had ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers' offices and lawyers' offices to the dinners and opera-boxes ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... in her mind when she opened her eyes; and the girl, under the impression of so disgusting a disillusion, remained for a while pondering and yawning, before making up her mind to exchange warmth and featherbed ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... social experiment. Some of them, discouraged, had returned to a "bourgeois" manner of life, some even to a "bourgeois" philosophy. Almost all of the anarchists I have known lost their philosophy and enthusiasm with middle age, and experience with the actual constitution of things, combined with disillusion regarding the ideal. Most of them had been hurt or broken by their attempt, but they all retained a certain something, a certain remaining dignity of having struggled against the inevitable, and had acquired insight into some of ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... silence of his brain he fought—fought against disillusion, claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping denunciations—the woman ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... on. From bitter disillusion felt against everything in her world her mind chilled to analysis. Her mother loved her, she believed, and yet—she did not complete her swift thought; indeed, she looked quickly about in fear of her ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... was very fresh and pleasant to look at; he seemed old for his years, which were few; he had a range of interests as well as powers of expression. Did he seem just a little conscious of his tender age? Was he not a bit too anxious to profess disillusion? Yes, he was cynical about Belgians, also about France, also about the Foreign Office. I suffered him thus far with a certain guilty gladness. But the Intelligence Officer demurred grimly. He was a patriot and ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... reported from various parts of France. A Prussian officer, speaking French fluently, was among a convoy of prisoners at Versailles yesterday. The officer, on seeing some French territorials march past, singing the "Marseillaise," remarked to his guard: "What a disillusion awaits us!" ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... general, "It was a great day for the Allies!" The repulse of the German attack was a real defeat, for it upset all the confident calculations of the enemy, who from the height of Mount Kemmel had seen, first Ypres, and then channel ports, within his grasp. It brought disappointment and disillusion to his troops, who had been urged on to their disastrous massed attacks by flamboyant promises of success. The effect was seen in a renewal of German peace propaganda, which all the Allies had learned by this time to disregard as unworthy of the ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... the work of reconstruction! [He sits down on the row or two of bricks.] The young man is still off on his quest for adventure and romance. Life must be giving him a splendid bath of disillusion. I can see him as he returns, his tail between his legs. Now I am working on Sylvette—she, too, will soon be cured. [He takes a letter from his pocket and puts it in the hollow of a tree-trunk. SYLVETTE appears at the back.] It's ...
— The Romancers - A Comedy in Three Acts • Edmond Rostand
... say, life is so full of disappointment, disillusion! More and more I ask myself, as I grow older, what is the good of it all? We dress, we go out to dinner,' I went on, 'but surely we walk in a vain show. How good this asparagus is! I often say asparagus is the most delicious of all vegetables. And yet, I don't know—when ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... chair, removing his feet from the railing. He was in his shirt- sleeves, and was smoking a pipe. The droop of his thin mustache matched the droop of his thin shoulders—and both indefinably but unmistakably spelled disillusion and discouragement. "It's grand, but I think it's too grand—for us. However, daughter says the best is none too good—in Hillerton. ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... is largely based on wrong and ignorant ideas, it must still be recognized that it is to some extent natural and inevitable. "How much is risked," exclaims Dugas, "in the privacies of love! The results may be disillusion, disgust, the consciousness of physical imperfection, of brutality or coldness, of aesthetic disenchantment, of a sentimental shock, seen or divined. To be without modesty, that is to say, to have no fear of the ordeals ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... in itself is too simple for Mascagni's strong dramatic talent, hence the lack of interest, hence the disillusion of ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... process, while his course of study proves that he is striving to produce mental acrobats, relegating the spiritual qualities to the rank of by-products. His course of study shows conclusively that he thinks that knowledge is power. Once disillusion him on this point and his course of study will cease to be to him the sacrosanct affair it has always appeared and he will no longer look upon it as a sort of sacrilege to inject into this course of study some elements that seem to ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... back through the shadow of my years, seeing not too clearly, but through the thickening veil of wish and after-thought, I seem to view my life divided into four distinct parts: the Age of Miracles, the Days of Disillusion, the Discipline of Work and Play, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... a finishing stroke to the disillusion. In all his troubles and perplexities the good Bishop of S— had been a rock to lean on for the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... struggle arm in arm with the Freethinkers (Radicals) or even with the National Liberals, if we make ourselves their accomplices, if we declare ourselves ready for the same miserable behavior which the Freethinkers made themselves guilty of by entering into an alliance with von Buelow, we may disillusion the masses; we may push them from us and kill political life. If the Social Democracy ceases to be an opposition party, if even this party is ready to betray its friends as soon as it becomes by such means "capable ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... not bring himself to the idea of confessions and disavowals. He could not bear to think of her disillusionment. He felt that he owed it to her not to disillusion her, to spoil things for her in that fashion. "To turn into something mean and ugly after she has believed in me.... It would be like playing a practical joke upon her. It would be like taking her into my arms and ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... They are there, the disappointed ones, but he doesn't know, he doesn't know! He hasn't on his conscience the memory of hearts cruelly wounded,—wounded even to death. He doesn't in memory see the eagerness in a good friend's eyes die to disillusion, to hopelessness, to bitter, bitter sorrow. He doesn't have to remember how the life died suddenly out of a voice that had been tender and eloquent. He doesn't sicken with the thought that his hand has ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... an end. On the bed, stretched at full length, with his Grand Army hat flung beside him, lay the inventor, dead. A little round hole in the temple, from which a few drops of blood had flowed, told what remained of his story. In the night disillusion had come, with failure. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... and how during the closing struggle with the tyrant they also have been present. When the fight is finally over, they prepare to depart, taking it for granted that Krishna and Balarama will come with them. Krishna has therefore to disillusion Nanda. He breaks the news to him that it is not he and Yasoda who are actually his parents but Vasudeva and Devaki. He loads Nanda with jewels and costly dresses and thanks him again and again for all his loving care. ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... that type of the worshipping spirit exhibited in Aprile, and in the poet Eglamor, whom Sordello foils and subdues in the contest of song. The fame as a singer which comes suddenly to him draws Sordello out of his Goito solitude to the worldly society of Mantua, and his experiences of disillusion and half voluntary self-degradation are those which had been faintly shadowed forth in Pauline, and exhibited more fully—and yet with a difference—in the Basil experiences of Paracelsus. Like the poet of Pauline, after his immersion in worldliness, Sordello ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... lingered, he glanced again; she was certainly a very pretty woman: there was the beautifully rounded chin, the short straight nose, and delicately curved upper lip, that he had seen in the profile,—and yet—yet it was not the same face he had dreamt of. With an odd, provoking sense of disillusion, he swept ahead of the coach, and again slackened his speed to let it pass. This time the fair unknown raised her long lashes and gazed suddenly at this persistent horseman at her side, and an odd expression, it seemed to him almost a glance ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... and lassitude of human spirit and the disappointment and disillusion as to the aftermath of the harvest of blood, may have aggravated, but they could not cause the symptoms of which I speak; for the very obvious reason that all these symptoms were in existence and apparent to a few discerning men for decades before the war. Indeed, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... from the British ambassador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls—brought up from New York in the special train—and a flourishing consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Nature and nothing else. Have I lost anything in getting down to fact instead of to fancy? Have I shut my eyes in pain—pain for disillusion? No—now I know that my home is not in Nature; there is no awe and splendour in her which can keep me with her. Oh, far beyond is the true splendour, the infinite source of awe and love ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... and we old fools can no longer dream. We have only those phantoms called memories, which are the husks of dreams. Disillusion stands in one doorway of our house and ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley) although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who, perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... or make him human. One day, working in the garden, I laughed out suddenly, delighted with the whimsical idea of making him, almost in spite of himself, the deus ex machina of my little drama, quite soft and sympathetic under his shell of would-be worldly disillusion, as occasionally happens ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... house, groaning in spirit, but thankful that she had taken it for granted that he had secured their release in the manner indicated. He did not propose to disillusion her. It would be time enough to take the blame when the blame came along. Probably old Derek would simply be amused and laugh at the whole bally affair like a sportsman. Freddie cheered up considerably at ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... years in which he came nearest to despair. The strain of a great movement is not in the early days of enthusiasm, but in the slow years when idealism is tempered by the strife of opinion and self-interest which brings delay and disillusion. As the war went on recruiting became steadily more difficult. The alliance with France actually worked to discourage it since it was felt that the cause was safe in the hands of this powerful ally. Whatever Great Britain's difficulties about finance they ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... lady, quite at her ease, armed with eyeglass and bouquet and bustle, away went my dream of the slim blushing maiden. The Colonel is quite right, Lionel; the romance once suspended, 'tis a haunting remembrance till thrown again in our way, but complete disillusion if we try to renew it; though I swear that in my case the interest was deep, and the heroine improved in her beauty. So with you and that dear little creature. See her again, and you'll tease, me no more to give you that portrait ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... image to my mind's eye that it became unnecessary for me to see the creature, and I ceased to look for him; then all at once came disillusion, when one day, hearing the familiar high-pitched laugh with its penetrating and somewhat nasal tone, I looked and beheld the thing that had laughed just leaving its perch on a branch near the ground and winging its way across the field. It was only a bird ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... speak. I could not then have revealed myself. It was all too marvellous, too hard to comprehend. The old doubts of my reality, of the realness of everything I had seen, surged up again, and swept over me in a tide of disillusion. ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... us that the soul makes a natural response "to a world built on the same heavenly pattern with itself and aglow with the same immortal fire." He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on the outside of things. The materialist is ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... held her, which made all others seem trifling by comparison. The next moment, a new life was born into the world—a new life, with all its heritage of certain sorrow and possible joy; with all its infinite sensibility to pleasure or pain, to hope and love and disillusion. ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... she had decided to fly, but the presence of Blanch rendered such a course impossible. The only alternative left her was to extricate herself as swiftly and gracefully as possible from her dilemma by making herself as disagreeable as possible in his eyes. In this wise she hoped to disillusion him, and it was with this intention she had come forth to meet him. She could not see him from where she sat, having turned her back upon him; but, judging from the length of time it took him to approach, ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... this disillusion that the idea took hold of Rhodes, which he communicated to his friends, to acquire the gold fields of the Rand, and to transform the rich Transvaal into a region where the Chartered Company and the South African League would rule. Previous to this, if we are to believe President ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... fiction, the first proposal comes in the nature of a shock. Disillusion follows as a matter of course. Men, evidently, do not read fiction, or at least do not profit by the valuable hints to be ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... generosity of many in America, and particularly those of German descent, has not been fully recognized or appreciated by the people of Germany. The total sum remitted to Germany for our Red Cross and other similar societies amounts to over 20,000,000 marks. The disillusion of our people at home when they realized the slight political influence exercised by the German-American element in the United States has led them to overlook their great achievements in the cause of charity, which were ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... a very silly toast, but let it go to please them—for why disillusion those who believe in ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... it may be occasioned by misfortune or accident. The parable of the Prodigal Son, however, shows that it is usually due to willful choice and to a desire for indulgence. Its results are sketched in appalling colors. We are shown all its disillusion, suffering, slavery, and despair. As a picture of the inevitable consequences of sin, no touch could be added to the scene of the prodigal in the far country when he had spent all, when the famine had arisen, when he had sold himself to feed ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
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