He stood looking down at her for a moment, wondering what could have reduced her to this condition.

) hung on a hook on the wall, and underneath it I could see his tie, knotted, ready to be slipped over his head, a black badge of frayed respectability that ought never to have left his neck.

I was at once disappointed, although just what I had expected him to look like I could not have explained.

As he lowered himself on the chair behind his desk I wondered what this dapper, slightly ridiculous man could possibly have to do with the workings of the hall.

No man could have reached his spot nor held it without being ruthless, and Hague had made a virtue of ruthlessness all of his life.

At once my ears were drowned by a flow of what I took to be Spanish, but -- the driver's white teeth flashing at me, the road wildly veering beyond his glistening hair, beyond his gesticulating bottle -- it could have been the purest Oxford English I was half hearing ; ;

with more time I could have loosened a small burr or cotter pin --

She realized I'd have to notify the police, but fervently hoped I could avoid mentioning her name.

They were married over the week-end, though he was easily sixty and she could not have been even thirty.

Her form was silhouetted and with the strong light I could see the outlines of her body, a body that an artist or anyone else would have admired.

If it were not that I knew who it was I could have mistaken it for my Aunt so well did her clothes fit him.

This was the worst thing I could have said.

and I have heard many say that they are content to earn a half or a third as much as they could up North because they so much prefer the quieter habits of their home town.

What steps have been taken to guard against the one sort of mishap that could trigger the destruction of continents??

This and other fears of the solar system have disappeared gradually, first, with the Ptolemaic system and its built-in concept of periodicity and then, more firmly, with the Newtonian innovation of an universal force that could account quantitatively for both terrestial and celestial motions.

The conversation that ensued may have been engrossing but it could hardly be called world-shattering.

The part of the mind that preserves dates and events may remonstrate, `` It could have been like that for only a little while '' ; ;

I have no picture in my mind of the garden as a whole -- that I could not see -- but certain aspects of certain corners linger in the memory: wind-blown, frost-bitten, white chrysanthemums beneath a window, with their brittle brown leaves and their sharp scent of November ; ;

Such problems are of extreme interest as well as importance and are so much like fighting in a rain forest or guerrilla warfare at night in tall grass that we might have to re-examine primitive conflicts for what they could teach.

Any attempt to reconcile this statement of the central issue in the campaign of 1956 with the nature of the man who could not conceive it as the central issue will at least resolve our confusions about the chaotic and misleading results of the earnestness of both doctors and President in a situation which should never have arisen.

Actually, you could wish for some passion, now and then, but when you look around the world and see the little volcanos of current history which partisan social passions have wrought, you are glad that in these pamphlets there is at least some civilized calm.

Given the conceptual context within which ancient thought thrived, how could anyone have questioned this principle??

He might have been the man in the moon for all you could have understood him.

If you had screamed right there in the street where we stood, I could not have felt more fear.

Two men, together like us, we could do somethin fine out there, maybe find a place where no one's ever been.

The fact that Jess's horse had not been returned to its stall could indicate that Diane's information had been wrong, but Curt didn't interpret it this way.

but if it had been, it had been smothered until now by fear ): you could tell it by the way she watched the older, bigger boys, like Jack.

Faulkner culminates the Southern legend perhaps more masterfully than it has ever been, or could ever be, done.

When these had been pocketed, we could still spend a morning cracking open other pebbles for our delight in seeing how much prettier they were inside than their dull exteriors indicated.

I was having lunch not long ago ( apologies to N. V. Peale ) with three distinguished historians ( one specializing in the European Middle Ages, one in American history, and one in the Far East ), and I asked them if they could name instances where the general mores had been radically changed with `` deliberate speed, majestic instancy '' ( Francis Thompson's words for the Hound Of Heaven's Pursuit ) by judicial fiat.

It ignores the sordid financial aspects ( quite conveniently, too, for his audience, who could indulge in moral indignation without visible, or even conscious, discomfort, their money from the transaction having been put away long ago in a good antiseptic brokerage ).

We had been walking quite briskly, for despite your being so small and me so tall, your stride in those days could easily match mine.

Some of the children of the family could not pronounce this name and called her Paula, a soubriquet Carl liked so much she has been Paula ever since.

`` Well, how could that have been??

Born a Congregationalist, he had been baptized as a tiny baby in the usual manner by having a few drops of water sprinkled on his head, yet nowhere in the whole of the New Testament could he find a description of anybody being baptized by sprinkling.

When Nan Patterson, a stunning and money-minded chorus girl who had appeared in a Floradora road show, rode down Broadway in a hansom cab with her married lover, Frank Young, she stopped the cab to disclose that Young had been shot dead, tearfully insisting that he had shot himself although experts said he could not have done so.

To the Republicans no victory could have been more complete.

For by now the original cause of the quarrel, Philip's seizure of Gascony, was only one strand in the spider web of French interests that overlay all western Europe and that had been so well and closely spun that the lightest movement could set it trembling from one end to the other.

The Macmillan government might be willing to let him go, but he has been dead seventy-eight years and even the Soviet morticians could not make him look presentable.

After arriving on Vulcan, T ' Pol is blackmailed into marrying her original betrothed, Koss, in order to save her mother's career ; although her mother, T ' Les, suggests to Trip he should express his feelings to T ' Pol before the ceremony so that she could have all available information.

The depiction within the film of the practice could be considered negative, as the process of being blackmailed into it seems to push the character into some form of mental instability ( although it is not clear whether that instability was present prior to the blackmail ), culminating in her tragic demise.

For example, if an actor is portraying a character who is being blackmailed, he or she could think back to some embarrassing or private fact about his or her own life, and mentally superimpose that onto the character's secret.

On several occasions, characters from his past with US Intelligence drew him into dangerous situations ; and he could also be blackmailed or tricked into participating in espionage missions, as he was the perfect deniable operative.