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.

I could observe the two fans down at the end, but their size in themselves meant nothing to me as long as I had no measure of comparison.

It purports to be a letter from Steele to a friend at court, who, in Miss Blanchard's opinion, could only be meant as Swift.

This meant, concretely, that the patient could not read at all without making writing-like movements of the head or body, became easily confused by `` hasher marks '' inserted between hand-written words and thus confused the mark for one of the letters, and could recognize a simple straight line or a curved one only by tracing it.

If you look at a reading meant for someone else, you will probably see that many of the items could be considered as applicable to you, even when you were not in the picture at all!!

Or you could hope the parachute wouldn't open just so you could say you saw it not open, not because you meant any harm to Starkey Poe in his suit of red underwear, but mainly because you were tired of being an old maid -- a thing which cannot admit when it thinks it might be pregnant, but must stand the dizzy feeling all alone and go on like everything is all right instead of being able to say to somebody in a normal voice: `` I think I'm pregnant ''.

The two little bangs meant that he was getting impatient to have a crowd of customers waited on and that if he had to he would jerk open the door and drag out, by the opposite door handle which she would be clutching, whichever-the-hell clerk it was who thought she could waste so much store time on the pot.

Living beside the sea meant that fish and shellfish could be used for food.

The second question is the meaning of the word avita: Gildas could have meant " ancestors ", or intended it to mean more specifically " grandfather " — thus indicating Ambrosius lived about a generation before the Battle of Mons Badonicus.

Some clever program counter catches meant that the ordinary system ROMs and any software using the OS calls could function without significant modification, making substantially more memory available for BASIC, View, Viewsheet and almost every other business application.

This meant that common three-conductor cables could be used.

This meant it could provide a separate programmable character for all of the 1024 ( 64x16 ) or 2000 ( 80x25 ) characters on the screen.

The color memory was also available in the " normal " TRS-80 and CP / M text modes, which meant that existing TRS-80 and CP / M software could be easily modified to add color.

The absence of a turret also meant that tank destroyers could be manufactured significantly cheaper, faster and more easily than the tanks on which they were based and fou8nd particular favor when production resoureces were lacking.

While this was OK for Europe, it meant that GSM could not cover large, sparsely populated rural areas of Australia cost effectively.

Because grocery stores are not permitted to carry wine or liquor, the older law essentially meant that only beer and alcoholic malt beverages could be purchased at all on Sundays.

At the same time, he was doing his National Service with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Shrewsbury, where Busby had advised him to apply as it meant he could still play for United at the weekend.

Also, the narrowness of the field meant that Boudica could put forth only as many troops as the Romans could at a given time.

This meant the idea of one early large scale offensive could not bring about a knockout blow.

To have held each office at the youngest possible age ( suo anno, " in his year ") was considered a great political success, since to miss out on a praetorship at 39 meant that one could not become consul at 42.

Initially limited frequency space meant that Channel 4 could not be broadcast alongside S4C, though some English Channel 4 programmes would be aired at less popular times on the Welsh variant, a practice that carried on up until the closure of S4C's analogue transmissions in 2010.

Declining attendance meant that the club's payroll could no longer support a franchise stocked largely with veterans from other clubs.