What is "refinement"

Usage examples of "refinement".

And now, as, according to a singular usage of the court, no male subject was ever allowed to sit at table with a queen or dauphiness of France, the dinner party over which the youthful pair, sitting side by side, presided, consisted wholly of these dames whose profession is not generally considered as imparting any great refinement to the manners, and who, before the close of the entertainment, showed, in more cases than one, that they had imported some of the notions and fashions of their more ordinary places of resort into the royal palace.

Late suppers, dyspepsy, gas companies, thieves, ward politicians, pretty waiter-girls, and other metropolitan refinements, were unknown among them.

And when the travelers, after a refreshing rest, went on their way next morning, considering the Elements and the pianos and the refinement, to say nothing of the cuisine, which is not treated of in the text-book referred to, they were content with a bill double that of brother Egger, in his brick magnificence.

Just a shade under two meters tall, with his golden hair ruthlessly cropped in the Academy bristle cut, he was a happy blend of the best in the Waldheim and de Gras family lines: Waldheim height and rugged strength, de Gras refinement and quick awareness.

Fordham Road for a new suit to wear when he entered the School of Mathematics at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures.

School of Mathematics at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures.

It was originally composed to incorporate every known possibility of human language, all the sounds of all the various tongues, not to mention such refinements as inflection, tonal changes, proxemics and kinesics, as well.

To revive this blade of grass, it suffices to exercise the natural virtues, achieve perfection of sight and hearing, vigor of body, memory, and facility for learning, refinement of manners, through frequent ablutions, lustral ceremonies, hymns, prayers.

Even refinement was lacking in it, since, on the contrary, it precisely resembled that of a simple-looking moujik, while I also had the same big hands and feet as he.

That alone was excellent news but, to top it, there had been a successful refinement of the peptide mix, eventually allowing isolation of a single active peptide.

Idealization of love in its ultimate fulfillment, the poetizing of the ardent flesh crying out for its craving mate, are characteristically ignored by the Teuton who seeks the baser gratifications without illuminations of loveliness or hesitations of delicate refinement.

This rusticity of habit was utterly free from that affected contempt of refinement and comfort which self-made men sometimes carry into their more affluent circumstances.

To be with Ethel was perpetual delight--she astonished this sisterless youngster with a thousand feminine niceties and refinements.

Pippy, who thereupon had been forced to earn her living in almost the only way possible for a woman of her advanced age,, Knowing her to be a woman of taste, culture and refinement, Maisie had induced Dan to engage her ak his housekeeper, which he was very loath to do, owing to serious objection on the part of Sooey Wan.

A more probable notion was that they were romantic Frenchmen who had grow weary of vice and refinement together,--possibly princes, expectants of the throne, Bourbon remainders, named Williams or otherwise, unhatched eggs, so to speak, of kings, who had withdrawn out of observation to wait for the next turn-over in Paris.