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??

He could have been blackmailed, or his family might have been threatened.

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.

How much of an accident could that be ''??

For example in the Netherlands, the law assumes the stronger participant ( e. g. a car driver ) is liable in the case of an accident with a weaker participant ( e. g. a cyclist ) unless it can be proved that the cyclist's behavior could not have been expected.

Much of her past and her real last name are a mystery, however it appears that she was severely injured in a space shuttle accident and was then cryogenically frozen until she could be healed.

Amy Dudley died in September 1560 from a fall from a flight of stairs and, despite the coroner's inquest finding of accident, many people suspected Dudley to have arranged her death so that he could marry the queen.

In the event of an accident, resulting in fuel spillage, the firewall can prevent burning fuel from entering the passenger compartment, where it could cause serious injury or death.

In some cases this may be desirable, but in other cases this could be due to an accident, such as when a user does not realize that their action will result in sending another request, or they did not receive adequate feedback that their first request was successful.

An understanding of the relationship between electricity and magnetism began in 1819 with work by Hans Christian Oersted, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, who discovered more or less by accident that an electric current could influence a compass needle.

An example of this situation could be phoning for an ambulance when a car accident has happened.

They thus claimed that human " excellence " was not an accident of fate or a prerogative of noble birth, but an art or " techne " that could be taught and learned.

Arsenic is often an impurity in copper ores, so the discovery could have been made by accident ; but eventually arsenic-bearing minerals were intentionally added during smelting.

By then he could not walk because of both the infection in his injured leg and an infirmity in his other from a traffic accident a decade earlier.

The report's conclusion was that the probable cause of the accident was an explosion of flammable fuel / air vapors in a fuel tank, and, although it could not be determined with certainty, the most likely cause of the explosion was a short circuit.

Without an earthquake I do not see how such an accident could happen.

It transpires that David used the excuse of the accident to quit football, because Audrey had a hatred of the sport and David knew that the only way their relationship could ever flourish would be to get football out of the picture.

Having killed his grandfather by accident, Perseus could not, or would not, inherit the throne of Argos.

A broader understanding of biosecurity that is emerging under threat of biological warfare, and the fear that such economically devastating events as the mad cow disease epidemic could recur, either deliberately ( as an act of bioterrorism ) or by accident due to unrestricted imports, is causing some nations, notably New Zealand, to adopt relatively harsh restrictions against imported organisms.

In the absence of the forensic findings of 1560, it was often assumed that a simple accident could not be the explanation — on the basis of near-contemporary tales that Amy Dudley was found at the bottom of a short flight of stairs with a broken neck, her headdress still standing undisturbed " upon her head ", a detail that first appeared as a satirical remark in the libel Leicester's Commonwealth of 1584 and has ever since been repeated for a fact.

An aviation incident is defined as an occurrence, other than an accident, associated with the operation of an aircraft that affects or could affect the safety of operations.

" Montana ", for instance, is about the insane ramblings of somebody who is about to die ; " Idaho " explores a famous rock story in which John Lennon, having consumed hallucinogenic drugs, believed he could drive his house ; " South Carolina " is about getting rich as a result of a bicycle accident.

Reyes ( north of San Francisco ), but died as the result of an accident during this voyage ; the remainder of the expedition, which could have reached as far north as the Rogue River in today's southern Oregon was led by Bartolomé Ferrelo.

The spacecraft was carrying an ant colony to see if they could be trained to sort tiny screws in space, but were released by Homer by accident.

Mechanically variable message signs could display speeds of 60, 80 and 100 km / h, " danger zone " or " accident ".

The first of the new series, Ranger 6, had a flawless flight, except that the television system was disabled by an in-flight accident and could take no pictures.

" Additionally, James Cresswell, an NRC inspector, warned for two years that a design flaw with U-shaped tubes could prevent coolant circulation and cause an accident like that which would occur at TMI.