What is "avowable"

Usage examples of "avowable".

The man who has often picked his food from baskets of scraps where the restaurateurs put their refuse, which are emptied at six o'clock every morning--that man is not likely to recoil before any means,--avowable, of course.

It was quite true that through the good offices of this lady, who had become her tenant in the new house, Brigitte had made a speculation in furniture not less advantageous in its way, but more avowable, than the very shady purchase of the house itself.

Their presence arose from the fact that the British government was not alone in wishing to change the state of affairs in the Spanish and even Portuguese possessions in South America: the French hoped to do the same, and well before London's tentative contacts with the potential rebels in Chile, Peru and elsewhere, the French had carried their much more ambitious (and much more avowable) plans to the verge of action.

Now according to my plan the Surprise will carry on with her avowable activities under her second in command and her present ship's company - the authorities' confidential arrangement for her hire will continue in force - and you and Aubrey will take the envoy to Pulo Prabang in the Diane, which has been bought into the service We had meant to wait until there was a victory that could be announced together with the news of Aubrey's reinstatement - a question of saving official face - but now it is agreed that the country's interests will be better served by openly, publicly, almost ostentatiously reinstating him and giving him this command.

As for the strangers who for purposes of commerce of other less avowable motives filled the town of Haarlem with their foreign ways — which oft were immoral and seldom sedate — she had been strictly taught to hold these in abhorrence and never to approach such men either with word or gesture.

And once again — as on that evening at Leyden — she fell almost to hating him, angered that such a man should be nothing better than a knave, a mercenary rogue paid to lend a hand in unavowable deeds.

But having attained, like her nephew, to what might fairly be called opulence, she kept at a safe and respectful distance from the Penal Code, and under cover of an agency that was fairly avowable, she sheltered practices more or less shady, on which she continued to bestow an intelligence and an activity that were really infernal.

When I consider what desire has done for me, how it has torn my heart - and mine an avowable desire, glorified by specious, heroic names - I am astonished that such men do not consume themselves entirely.

She had been his helpmeet in many unavowable extravagances, in the days when he was still striving after a brilliant position in town.

There were so many unavowable pleasures these days, which required a human cloak to cover the identity of the real transgressor, that people like Master and Mistress Endicott prospered vastly.

He had put all his money in front of him, some two hundred and sixty pounds all told, for his winnings during the last half hour had not been as steady as heretofore, and he had not yet succeeded altogether in making up that sum of money for which he yearned with all the intensity of a disturbed conscience, eager to redeem one miserable fault by another hardly more avowable.

Over the sea it hung heavy and dank like a huge sheet of gray thrown over things secret and unavowable.

The breeze itself was lulled and the fog gathered itself together and wrapped the unavowable horrors of the night in a gray and ghoul-like shroud.