Betty did not imagine her likely to notice it; she was a person of abstraction.
"The Furnace"
Rose Macaulay
He speculated momentarily on the change in his own attitude towards this abstraction; how it had been to him once the absent remoteness of one interested mainly in things; how it was to him now the remoteness, not absent, but very deliberate, of one whose realization of and discrimination between 'sorts of people' was quite complete.
"The Furnace"
Rose Macaulay
He sat there, shading his eyes with his curved palm, watching his wife, thinking of past, present, and future in that confused and gentle abstraction which we call happiness, when she suddenly opened her eyes and looked at him for one brief instant with a blank and vacant gaze.
"Command"
William McFee