What is "keenness"

Usage examples of "keenness".

Kowalski, with a keenness which Asch and Wedelmann found quite astonishing.

The frosty night, and the keenness of the stars, made Mr Cupples shiver.

XIX It is generally taken for granted nowadays by fervent educationalists that the important thing to encourage in boys is keenness in every department of school life.

And the occasion which produced that prosaic thought was a night well calculated to make one think of supper and fireside, though the one might be frugal and the other lonely, and as I, Gulliver Jones, the poor foresaid Navy lieutenant, with the honoured stars of our Republic on my collar, and an undeserved snub from those in authority rankling in my heart, picked my way homeward by a short cut through the dismalness of a New York slum I longed for steak and stout, slippers and a pipe, with all the pathetic keenness of a troubled soul.

The worst sort of superstition, straight out of the darkest days of paganism, when people still lived like beasts, possessing no keenness of the eye, incapable of distinguishing colours, but presuming to be able to smell blood, to scent the difference between friend and foe, to be smelled out by cannibal giants and werewolves and the Furies, all the while offering their ghastly gods stinking, smoking burnt sacrifices.

That involuntary murmur, scarcely audible, so soft was it, seemed in some way to satisfy de Batz, for the keenness of his gaze relaxed, and his fat fingers ceased their nervous, intermittent tattoo on the ledge of the box.

But Adam Kraus, instead of showing the boredom which Beryl expected, studied it with absorbed keenness, quickly grasping what Dale wanted to do.

There was always far more keenness shown about house matches than school matches, a fact which worried Buller immensely.

It was amazing how he entered with perspicuity and keenness upon every thing that occurred in conversation.

No doubt the marked contrast between the neighbouring people of Nova Scotia and New England was quickly discerned by so good an observer as the author proved himself to be, while his national and partisan judgments made his characterization of the Yankee to be a double-edged sword, that cut with equal keenness the Colonist and the Democrat.

His bright blue eye, which at all times shone with uncommon keenness and splendour, had its vivacity augmented by fever and mental impatience, and glanced from among his curled and unshorn locks of yellow hair as fitfully and as vividly as the last gleams of the sun shoot through the clouds of an approaching thunderstorm, which still, however, are gilded by its beams.

I believe that the party of Colonel Juarez could possibly have followed my trail so swiftly except for the keenness and dedication of the two Chavante Indian guides, Apoena and Ataul!

Kathleen and Jimmy stood amazed at the sudden keenness of her interest in what seemed to them the dullest story.

The keenness with which Chambers checked the revisions was something of a giveaway, though it appears the two men did not discuss it.

The question was so quickly put, and with so much apparent keenness, that Stevens found the tables suddenly reversed.