Self Guarded

All the attractions in the world cannot worm shillings out of a public which is so prudent and canny that it has self-guarded itself by leaving its cash at home! ❋ George De Horne Vaizey (1887)

I treated matter with the perfect frankness and credulity which passes away with childhood; and she rewarded me with visions and illusions that are withheld from self-guarded and discreet manhood. ❋ John Albee (1874)

He had melted her, and won the confession of her senses by a surprise, and he owned that never had woman been so vigilantly self-guarded or so watchful to keep her lover amused and aloof. ❋ George Meredith (1868)

Ah, "continued Beatrice, with a softness of which she was unconscious, but which might have been extremely dangerous to youth less steeled and self-guarded than was Randal Leslie's, --" ah, I am less ambitious than you suppose. ❋ Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton (1838)

The former had watched with painful interest the expression of Mahtoree's eye, while the words of Middleton and Paul were pursuing their footsteps, but the mien of the Indian was far too much restrained and self-guarded, to permit the smallest of his emotions to escape through any of those ordinary outlets, by which the condition of the human volcano is commonly betrayed. ❋ James Fenimore Cooper (1820)

Your eyes, which are now so principally filled with innocence that that bright quality drowns all the rest, will look upon so much of deadly suffering and of misuse in men, that they will very early change themselves in kind; and all your face, which now vaguely remembers nothing but the early vision from which childhood proceeds, will grow drawn and self-guarded, and will suffer some agonies, a few despairs, innumerable fatigues, until it has become the face of a woman grown. ❋ Hilaire Belloc (1911)

a surprise, and he owned that never had woman been so vigilantly self-guarded or so watchful to keep her lover amused and aloof. ❋ George Meredith (1868)