What is "mystification"

Usage examples of "mystification".

I loved her tenderly, I adored her, but at that moment it was not her whom I wanted, because at first her presence had struck me as a mystification.

As I must answer without knowing the person to whom I am writing, you must feel, madam, that, unless I should possess a large dose of vanity, I must fear some mystification, and my honour requires that I should keep on my guard.

Charteris had literally gibbered in the presence of eye-witnesses at one point in the second act, when Spennie, by giving a wrong cue, had jerked the play abruptly into act three, where his colleagues, dimly suspecting something wrong, but not knowing what it was, had kept it for two minutes, to the mystification of the audience.

Away we go, full of hope, only to encounter some fresh mystification, till our breathless djins get quite bewildered.

In short, honest Jean Descloux was a fair sample of that homebred, upright common-sense which seems to form the instinct of the mass, and which it is greatly the fashion to deride in those circles in which mystification passes for profound thinking, bold assumption for evidence, a simper for wit, particular personal advantages for liberty, and in which it is deemed a mortal offence against good manners to hint that Adam and Eve were the common parents of mankind.

Then Mortimer said something maddeningly oblique, and Nerita replied with the same off-center mystification, and Mein once more was plunged into the river of their easy dancing wordplay, down into it, down and down and down, and as he struggled to keep from drowning, as he fought to comprehend their interchanges, he never once looked toward the place where Sybille sat, not even once, and congratulated himself on having accomplished that much at least in his masquerade.

When I returned with Quen, Zell, and Oran, and the crew could see for themselves that Quen and I were both much improved from our injuries, their young faces gleamed with mystification and delight.

His boasts were always uttered with a wan, lack-lustre irony, as if he were burlesquing the conventional Western brag and enjoying the mystifications of his listener, whose feeble sense of humor often failed to seize his intention, and to whom any depreciation of New England was naturally unintelligible.

Mindanao and over the Sulu Sea, the Moros came to know and trust Alvarez and finally to make pilgrimages to him, bringing their mystifications, their troubles and their fears.

As I must answer without knowing the person to whom I am writing, you must feel, madam, that, unless I should possess a large dose of vanity, I must fear some mystification, and my honour requires that I should keep on my guard.

He kept his mystification to himself, however, because he well knew the Air Force was a compartmentalized outfit.

More or less reconciled, by now, to permanent mystification regarding the authorship of Giant, I was surprised and gratified to receive a further communication from Hulbert Burroughs, unravelling the mystery at last.

The only reason which prevents me from choosing one of the two other arrangements proposed by you, either of which would have suited me better because they greatly honour me, is, allow me to repeat it, a fear of being the victim of a mystification.

Between the mystifications of Master Spy and the divarications of Codger, Dinadh-Alliance communication soon dwindled to a muddy trickle.

The routine procedure had been for the Air Force to deny that any of its aircraft were in the vicinity of the UFO sighting, and to volunteer nothing about unauthorized penetrations, thus solidifying public mystification.