Strange as it may seem to the inveterately domestic, I enjoy a little table of my own, with a paper or a book beside me and the utter absence of the "please pass the butter" or "I'll trouble you for the hash" of the boarding-house.
"A Top-Floor Idyl"
George van Schaick
He could no longer see Mrs. Pasmer harmless if trivial, and good-hearted if inveterately scheming; he could not see the dignity and refinement which he had believed in Mr. Pasmer; they had both suffered a sort of shrinkage or collapse, from which he could not rehabilitate them.
"April Hopes"
William Dean Howells Last Updated: February 27, 2009
The points seemed irreconcilable to those who were not in the habit of taking human nature into their calculations of a possible course of conduct; even Wilfrid, though he was aware that Barto Rizzo hated Vittoria inveterately, imagined Sarpo's first lie to have necessarily fathered a second.
"Vittoria, v8"
George Meredith