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.

nor was she moved by a letter from Wright pointing out that if he was not `` compelled to spend money on useless lawyer's bills, useless hotel bills, and useless doctor's bills '', he could more quickly provide Miriam with a suitable home either in Los Angeles or Paris, as she preferred.

All areas of history were either favorably or adversely affected by the geographical environment, and no respectable historian could pursue the study of history without a thorough knowledge of geography.

Just as I know I would make a bad soldier even though I cannot sincerely call myself a pacifist, so too I would not be either a hangman by profession or, if I could avoid it, even a member of a hanging jury.

It could go either way, since the gains for both points of view were about the same.

He wondered how they could go on in poverty, superstition, ignorance, with a complete lack of desire to make either their land or their lives flourish.

`` We have tried to make both paths attractive, so that good men could find opportunity and satisfaction in either.

One woman -- she could have been either English or American -- went up to him and said, ' But you are the foreigners ' ''.

The data reported here are either from spectra from which the adsorbed water resonance could easily be eliminated or from spectra of samples evacuated and sealed off at 375-degrees-C which contain no adsorbed water.

When the early part of the gradient was flattened, either by using the gradient shown in Fig. 2 or by allowing the `` cone-sphere '' gradient to become established more slowly, Region 2 activity could sometimes be separated into two areas ( donors P. J. and R. S., Fig. 1 and E. M., Fig. 2 ).

Equivalents could be assigned to the paradigm either at the time it is added to the dictionary or after the word has been studied in context.

As the background discussion indicated there were frequently expressed doubts that a government dominated by either party could fairly administer elections.

What bits of Brumidi and Costaggini could be reached at either end seemed in good order, though the roughish sandy surface was thick with dust.

They were both breathing heavily, out cold, and Shayne didn't think either of them had recognized him or could describe him.

In either case, it could call a special session of the Legislature later in 1961 to make another stab at raising additional revenues through a tax raiser.

She sounded so exactly like Doaty that Henrietta obeyed her under the clear impression that she could either comply or stay home.

It seemed unlikely that her crew, if either of them were alive, could even see the Ariadne, for they were passing her at a distance of nearly a light-year.

The Ancient Greek word for seaweed was φῦκος ( fūkos or phykos ), which could mean either the seaweed ( probably red algae ) or a red dye derived from it.

He argued Congress could not decide either for or against slavey before a territory was settled.

He argues that because a child's suffering is so horrible and cannot easily be ex-plained, it forces people into a crucial test of faith: either we must believe everything or we must deny everything, and who, Paneloux asks, could bear to do the latter?

It is therefore better to assume that Christie provided no authoritative chronology for Poirot's retirement, but assumed that he could either be an active detective, a consulting detective or a retired detective as the needs of the immediate case required.

His report of life there covers a wide range of topics, such as marriage in heaven ( where all angels are married ), children in heaven ( where they are raised by angel parents ), time and space in heaven ( there are none ), the after-death awakening process in the World of Spirits ( a place halfway between Heaven and Hell and where people first wake up after death ), the allowance of a free will choice between Heaven or Hell ( as opposed to being sent to either one by God ), the eternity of Hell ( one could leave but would never want to ), and that all angels or devils were once people on earth.

Communities either could not afford music accompaniment or rejected it out of a Calvinistic sense of simplicity, so the songs were sung a cappella.

Alfred lamented in the preface to his translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care that " learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English, or even translate a single letter from Latin into English: and I suppose that there were not many beyond the Humber either ".

And a solemn diploma from Christ Church, Canterbury dated 873 is so poorly constructed and written that historian Nicholas Brooks posited a scribe who was either so blind he could not read what he wrote or who knew little or no Latin.

It was capable of basic graphics, and could display onto either a television set, a colour ( RGB ) monitor or a " green screen " monitor.