Sometimes, it is true, he disposed of a phial of his cement, producing his bottle and receiving payment with the absorbed impassivity of an automaton.
He seemed to have attained to a secret inner calm, to an obsessional impassivity across which the passing calamities of existence only echoed.
His features had the same impassivity that always characterized him; from his face one could never have guessed whether he was happy or the reverse.
The other, evidently a servant, preserved an impassivity of countenance such as only a Chinaman can command.
This agrees admirably with the theory of impassivity in literature, so much in vogue when Maupassant became known.
In the books that follow, his impassivity gives way like an edifice that has been slowly undermined.
The day came, however, when this dominant impassivity became stirred, when the marble became flesh by contact with life and suffering.
The sight of Stonor's cool impassivitycalmed him somewhat.
With a splendid impassivity in the face of precautions so unprecedented, the servant withdrew.
Hendricks, the footman, received my order with impassivity and shut us in together with the unconcern of a good servant.
The discipline of a man-of-war prevailed; everything went forward with stereotyped precision and formality; the officers were supposed to comport themselves with impassivity and self- effacement.
There was something which chilled even him in the cold impassivity of her features.
He went on quietly as before, every feature controlled to impassivity and his arms lightly folded: "That is well.
The stars saw what few men had ever seen--Arnold Trent stripped of his mask, his citadel of impassivity beaten down.
She looked up at him with that odd dark impassivity that seemed to remove her so deliberately from her fellow-beings.
Then suddenly herimpassivity had a strange effect upon him.
But in some dark fashion that strange impassivity held her.
To one whose innate instinct was a yielding to impulse, his absolute impassivity in face of disconcerting situations was something incomprehensible.
For the first time in her knowledge of him, the mask of impassivity dropped from his face; his cold eyes gleamed unpleasantly.
Her face was in shadow, but his was not, and she could see that fires were lighted in the stone-grey eyes that banished all its masklike impassivity and brought a wonderful beauty into it.
For the first time, the well-bred impassivity of his face irked and infuriated her.
The impassivity of the natives departed from them when they stood about the funeral pyres, and clapping of hands and warlike chanting went heavenward with the smoke.
It carried a woebegone impassivity, the impassivity which implied he was so submerged in misery that no further blow could be of consequence to him.
I demanded, trying to match his impassivity with my own.
The eyes were grey, and with a certain calm and impassivity about them--the calm of one so highly placed that nothing can easily affect him; one sees it in the eyes of kings and queens.
The serenity and impassivity of a great prince who had never known anything but a smooth seat high upon Olympus had gone also.
Doubtless the game he was now playing did not need such mask-like impassivity of expression as an ordinary game would.
Old John's face lost something of its impassivity as he in turn raised to the limit.
He had perceived that the impassivity of the waiter's countenance covered a blank misery.
But after a moment of hostile confrontation the professional impassivity of a waiter--which is perhaps the ultimate perfection of sang froid--descended about him like a cloak and mask.
Her early impassivity may have been the defence reaction of a highly sensitive compassionate nature.
Read it again, more slowly, and its impassivity seems to melt into concrete emotion; this is virgin modesty hiding behind verse as at other times behind raiment.
The narrow gleam of the dark eyes out of the rigid impassivity of the dark face was more bodeful than a torrent of curses.
James heard of his host's defection with impassivity and a glance of his eyeglass.
And all got smoothly, without a crease of the forehead, by means of an eyeglass, a cold manner and an impassivity which nothing foreign or domestic had ever disturbed.
The impassivity of his features was like a wall before her.
Anyhow, imagine, first of all, a marble block of impassivity out of which is carved the figure of an old man.
And another thing was the silence and the marvellous impassivity of the faces as the column made its slow way toward where the whole forest spluttered and fluttered with battle.
