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Hectic   Listen
adjective
Hectic  adj.  
1.
Habitual; constitutional; pertaining especially to slow waste of animal tissue, as in consumption; as, a hectic type in disease; a hectic flush.
2.
In a hectic condition; having hectic fever; consumptive; as, a hectic patient.
Hectic fever (Med.), a fever of irritation and debility, occurring usually at a advanced stage of exhausting disease, as a in pulmonary consumption.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hectic" Quotes from Famous Books



... which he had trodden but a few hours since —he passed the same splendid bridge on which he had stood despairing, to quit it revived—he gained the Rue Faubourg St. Honore. A young man in a cabriolet, on whose fair cheek burned the hectic of late vigils and lavish dissipation, was rolling leisurely home from the gaming-house, at which he had been more than usually fortunate—his pockets were laden with notes and gold. He bent forwards ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... breeding? There was a want of reality in all she heard and saw that struck painfully upon her heart; and after the first novelty of the scene had worn off, she began to pine for the country. Her step became less elastic, her cheek yet paler, and the anxious father began to watch more closely these hectic changes, and to tremble for ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie

... glad to reach the hectic crowdedness of the tiny principality of Monaco—that triple essence of civilization and sensuous luxury. He felt at home with the big idea that drew the whole world to the gaming tables to pay homage to the goddess Fortune. For a moment the ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction, though I admit that this is not necessarily a sign of unsophisticated morality. In a word, when an Englishman goes to France ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... that were past and seemed serenely certain of a comfortable future. There was no too modern uneasiness about it, no trifling, gim-crack furniture constructed to catch the eye and the angles of any one venturing to seek repose upon it, no unmeaning rubbish of ornaments or hectic flummery of second-rate pictures. Above the high oaken mantel-piece was a little pure bust in marble of the Prophet when a small boy. To right and left were pretty miniatures in golden frames of the Prophet's delightfully numerous grandmothers. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... like Brigaut's. She slipped the note into the pocket of her apron. The hectic spots upon her cheekbones turned to a cherry-scarlet. These two children went through, all unknown to themselves, many more emotions than go to the make-up of a dozen ordinary loves. This moment in the market-place left in their souls a well-spring of ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... knocked dumb-foolish at once, he says, by my eyes and my figure and my hair. He is not long up from Cape Colony: came out from London through chest-trouble, to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp" (do you hear hectic, coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid joke?). "And if I'll only be engaged to him, he promises to get rich, become as big a swell on the Rand as Marks or Du Taine—isn't that funny, his not knowing ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... sweep of her hair, which was combed straight back from her forehead. Her eyes were looking heavenward while she worked, yet they caught no beam, no colour from her celestial visions. Small hectic blotches burned in the centre of her cheeks, and her thin lips were pressed tightly together as though she bit back a cry. Sometimes she would remain dumb for an hour in his presence, while her thoughts ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... and obscenities. Mad laughter mingled with pale fear and wild scorn in turns were written on the hectic faces ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... win the race.' "Such was the doctrine our young prophet taught; And here conviction, there confusion wrought; When his thin cheek assumed a deadly hue, And all the rose to one small spot withdrew, They call'd it hectic; 'twas a fiery flush, More fix'd and deeper than the maiden blush; His paler lips the pearly teeth disclosed, And lab'ring lungs the length'ning speech opposed. No more his span-girth shanks and quiv'ring thighs Upheld a body ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe

... at the vehemence of his caresses, presently, as if prompted by Nature, smiled in reply to them. Again he held her at some distance from him, and examined her more attentively; he satisfied himself that the complexion of the young cherub he had in his arms was not the hectic tinge of disease, but the clear hue of ruddy health; and that though her little frame was slight, it ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... was not sleep,—it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour. Pisani missed something,—what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,—the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar. He rose,—he left his ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... and athletic, he stood to face the no less tall, but very delicate and frail, M. de Vilmorin. The latter also disdained to make any of the usual preparations. Since he recognized that it could avail him nothing to strip, he came on guard fully dressed, two hectic spots above the cheek-bones burning ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... instrument, half dulcimer, half barrel-organ, was endeavoring by means of analogy to arouse the pity of the public for his painful injury; a lame, deformed boy, forming with his violin one single, indistinguishable mass, was playing endless waltzes with all the hectic violence of his misshapen breast; and finally an old man, easily seventy years of age, in a threadbare but clean woolen overcoat, who wore a smiling, self-satisfied expression. This old man attracted my entire attention. He stood there bareheaded ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... to the sill in a pleasant sea of waving grass. But she was turned from it, staring apprehensively toward the tea-room. Round her swirled the heat from the stove, and restless flies lighted on her cheek and flew off at hectic tangents. ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis

... Body culture is ultimately only for the sake of the mind and soul, for body is only its other ego. Not only is all muscle culture at the same time brain-building, but a book-worm with soft hands, tender feet, and tough rump from much sitting, or an anemic girl prodigy, "in the morning hectic, in the evening electric," is a monster. Play at its best is only a school of ethics. It gives not only strength but courage and confidence, tends to simplify life and habits, gives energy, decision, and promptness to the will, brings consolation and peace ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... funds, stayed for all he had before him. "I've got a show for this much," he said, pushing back the side money. "And a pretty good one. Bet your fool heads off! You've got to beat a hectic flush ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... the Fifth were dearly purchased by the decline of industry at home, and the loss of liberty. The patriot will see little to cheer him in this "golden age" of the national history, whose outward show of glory will seem to his penetrating eye only the hectic brilliancy of decay. He will turn to an earlier period, when the nation, emerging from the sloth and license of a barbarous age, seemed to renew its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott

... reader reached this singular conclusion, which came with an abruptness that indicated the decrepit imagination of the author and his overworked vocabulary, she looked up from the absurd vehicle of all this hectic style and incident and beheld in the eyes of her auditor a suggestion of the light that is indigenous to neither ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... don't know the elements o' that evolution; but he fell back on 'is naval rank an' office, an' Agg grew peevish. I wasn't sorry to get out of the cart ... Have you ever considered how, when you an' I meet, so to say, there's nearly always a remarkable hectic day ahead of us! Hullo! Behold ...
— Traffics and Discoveries • Rudyard Kipling

... trial at Sheep Camp is an old one, but it differs with every telling. In the hectic hurry of that gold-rush many incidents were soon forgotten and such salient facts as did survive were deeply colored, for those were colorful days. That trial marked an epoch in early Yukon history, for, although its true significance was unsensed at the ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... Around whose bark the wint'ry winds Like fiends of fury rave!—Oh, while ye feel 'tis hard to toil And labor long hours through, Remember, it is harder still To have no work to do! 4 Ho, ye upon whose fevered cheeks The hectic glow is bright, Whose mental toil wears out the day, And half the weary night, Who labor for the souls of men, Champions of truth and right!—Although ye feel your toil is hard, Even with this glorious view, Remember, it is ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... was one of the frank displays of human hopes, yearnings, and vanities, that sometimes take place on steamboats. Feathers had a hectic brilliancy that proved secret, dumb longings. Pendants known as "lavaleers" hung from necks otherwise innocent of the costly fopperies of Versailles. Old ladies clad in princess dresses with yachting ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... made me a visit on Thursday, in this my melancholy attendance. He began with complaints of his ill health and spirits, his hectic cough, and his increased malady of spitting blood; and then led to ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... and wan, A pale consumptive coughed with labored breath, His sunken eyes and hectic flush upon His cheek, foretold a sure but lingering death; I thought, whene'er I met his hollow stare, A wasting death like ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... deflected from the straight paths of integrity and virtue. Already the fresh eagerness of youth has palled into satiety, already some of its sparkling-wine for him is bitter as vinegar; with him already pleasure has become hectic fever instead of a healthy glow. Alas! he is not happy. Within these two years he has lost—and his countenance betrays the fact in its ruined beauty—he has lost the true joys of youth, and known instead of them the troubles of the envious, the fears of the cowardly, the heaviness of the ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... bark a larger quantity of the prussic acid principle, which is sedative to the nervous centres, and also some considerable tannin. As an infusion, or syrup, or vegetable extract, it will allay nervous palpitation of the heart, and will quiet the irritative hectic cough of consumption, whilst tending to ameliorate the impaired digestion. Its preparations can be readily had from our leading druggists, and are found to be highly useful. A teaspoonful of the syrup, with one or two tablespoonfuls of cold water, is a dose for an adult ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... few words of introduction over, she sank into total silence; and though she made an effort, from time to time, to smile at Lafontaine's frivolities, it was but a feeble one, and she sat, with pallid lips and a hectic spot on her statue-like cheek, gazing on the carpet. I attempted to take some share in the conversation; but all my powers of speech were gone, my tongue refused to utter, and I remained the most complete and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... Hectic day followed hectic day. Ben Wrail did not appear on the floor. Calls to his office netted exactly nothing. Mr. Wrail ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak

... beautiful Feodora improved from day to day, so that she daily drove with her devoted and constant companions, Mrs. Jones and Mattie. She began to eat heartily, gained flesh rapidly, and her cough had nearly left her. Roses of health assumed the place of hectic flush, and she was the talk and wonder of everyone who knew of ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... by with no more regard for him than had he been one of the house's lackeys. She was, he observed, of middle-age, lean and aquiline-featured, with an exaggerated chin, that ended squarely as boot. Her sallow cheeks were raddled to a hectic color, a monstrous head-dress—like that of some horse in a lord mayor's show—coiffed her, and her dress was a mixture of extravagance and ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... music? The answer is not easily given. His music is characterised by great buoyancy and freshness, by an abounding vitality, by a constantly juxtaposed tenderness and strength, by a pervading nobility of tone and feeling. It is charged with emotion, yet it is not brooding or hectic, and it is seldom intricate or recondite in its psychology. It is music curiously free from the fevers of sex. And here I do not wish to be misunderstood. This music is anything but androgynous. It is always virile, often passionate, and, in its ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman

... bridge. Now and then those who were not playing ventured a subdued murmur of talk amongst themselves, but for the most part the silence of the room was only broken by voices declaring trumps in a rapidly ascending scale of values, and then, after a hectic interval, by the same voices calling out the score in varying degrees ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... soon gave way to the impulse of affection, and he hastily entered the chamber. George was reading, and had his back turned towards him. As he heard the footsteps, he half turned round; an enquiry was on his lip, when his eye caught Henry's figure—a hectic flush suffused his cheek—he rose eagerly, and threw himself ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... the foreign element within the gates. All the Americans began to study Spanish, and all the Puerto Ricans to study English, without particularly gratifying results on either side. Cocking-mains, local games of chance, and more hectic immoralities were set forth for the delectation of the private soldiers; while I have personal knowledge of at least one quasi-clandestine bullfight, that may be best described as a ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman

... His expenses were what he could get, and his debauchery beyond all precedents, which at last lost him that love the Spaniards had for him; and that country not admitting his constant drinking, he fell sick of a hectic fever, in which he turned his religion, and with that artifice could scarce get to keep him whilst he lived in that sickness, or to bury him ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe

... us, there being cough and expectoration, dyspnoea, sharp pain in the thoracic region, colliquative sweats,[9] and great emaciation, while at the same time, the pulse was slow and weak, not exceeding thirty-six in the minute for a week before death. No hectic heat of skin, but an extraordinary depression of the arterial action, arising evidently from the redundancy of carbon deposited in the pulmonary tissue, preventing the proper oxygenation of the blood circulating in the organs, and thereby producing a morbid effect on the whole system, which sufficiently ...
— An Investigation into the Nature of Black Phthisis • Archibald Makellar

... me I should surely never perish By famine, poison, or the enemy's sword; The hectic fever, cough, or pleurisy, Should never hurt me, nor the tardy gout: But in my time, I should be once surprised By a strong tedious talker, that should vex And almost bring me to consumption: Therefore, if I were wise, she warn'd me shun All such long-winded ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... turn to unhappiness; and for that circumstance, my father took vengeance upon myself and my mother. How he could treat my poor mother so I cannot understand. It used to rend my heart to see her, so hollow were her cheeks becoming, so sunken her eyes, so hectic her face. But it was chiefly around myself that the disputes raged. Though beginning only with some trifle, they would soon go on to God knows what. Frequently, even I myself did not know to what they related. Anything and everything ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... pulse. Epiala and lipparia were febrile conditions concerning which there seems to have been much difference of opinion, even in the days of Gilbert. Apparently they were distinguished by variations of external and internal temperature, or by chills combined with fever. Febris ethica is our modern hectic fever. In the discussion of this last variety we are introduced to the "ros" and "cambium" of Avicenna, apparently varieties of ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson

... round like one moving in a dream; her eyes looking straight before her in a fixed gaze, her lips curved with a forced smile. After a moment or two she grew warmer; the blood began to circulate, a hectic flush ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... farm-buildings are apt to have in early spring. The roofs were black with rain, and brightened with patches of green moss. Farmer Jordan instinctively calculated how many "bunches o' shingle" would be required to rescue them from the decline into which they had fallen, indicated by these hectic ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... not like, in his good nature, to refuse her. And he sat there and read the long letters. Read Sibylla's. Before the last one was fully accomplished, Lionel's cheeks wore their hectic flush. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... of the Italian situation seems to me to have been much exaggerated. There was, so far as I could see, no great popular fervor over the disinherited Italians in Austrian lands, in spite of the hectic items about Austrian tyranny appearing daily in the newspapers—no great popular agony of mind over these "unredeemed." Also it was obvious that Italy in her new frontier proposed to include quite as many unredeemed Austrians and other folk ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... the books of writers who were young just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested incident. We lose by the slow ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... not, rapidly contracts and coalesces. At the same time any constitutional symptoms previously occasioned by the accumulation of the matter are got rid of without the slightest risk of the irritative fever or hectic hitherto so justly dreaded in ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... not believe that anything ought not to be that was as beautiful as the varied rosy tints of the hectic beauty of the exquisitely shaped and delicately pinked foliage of the field carrots, and with her cousin's assistance she soon had a large bouquet where no two leaves were alike, their hues ranging from the deepest ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... industrial class the women who suffered most at the outbreak of the war were those that worked in the shops. Paris is a city of little shops. The average American tourist knows them not, for her hectic experiences in the old days were confined to the Galeries Lafayette, the Louvre, the Bon Marche, and the Trois Quartiers. But during the greater part of 1915 street after street exhibited the dreary picture of shuttered windows, where once every sort of delicate, solid, ingenious, costly, or ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... hast thou learnt at last to jazz? Come take my arm, my clomplish boy;" O hectic day! Cheero! Cheeray! He ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... Layers of subcutaneous fat vanish and half-dormant sweat glands come to life. Other changes are more subtle than the temperature adjustment, but equally important. The sleep center of the brain is depressed. Short naps or a night's rest every third or fourth day becomes enough. Life takes on a hectic and hysterical quality that is perfectly suited to the environment. By the time of the first frost, rapid-growing crops have been raised and harvested, sides of meat either preserved or frozen in mammoth lockers. With this supreme talent ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison

... city, and a good sweep of the heavens for the telescope, in which Padre Lluc seemed especially to delight. The observatory is commodious, and is chiefly directed by an attenuated young priest, with a keen eye and hectic cheek; another was occupied in working out mathematical tables;—for these Fathers observe the stars, and are in scientific correspondence with astronomers in Europe. This circumstance gave us real pleasure on their account,—for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... week later, as old Mr. Naseby sat brooding in his study, that there was shown in upon him, on urgent business, a little hectic ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Though not marked with much that can be termed strikingly original, this, instead of militating against them, may have told in their favour. Wayward conceits, fanciful thoughts and expressions in songs, are like the hectic hue on the cheek of the unhealthy; it may appear to give a surpassing beauty, but it is a beauty which forebodes decay. "Oh, are ye sleeping, Maggie?" may be regarded as the most original of Tannahill's songs. It is more ardent in tone, and in every respect more poetic, than his ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... on, and the friends disperse. Keats, returning to Wentworth Place flushed with hectic exhilaration, finds a veritable douche of cold water awaiting him, in the shape of a letter from his publishers. They refer to his unlucky first volume of poems, brought out in 1817. "By far the greater number of persons who have purchased ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron

... narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... could possibly mistake. You may tell a young woman in the employment of a large dress- maker, at any time, by a certain neatness of cheap finery and humble following of fashion, which pervade her whole attire; but unfortunately there are other tokens not to be misunderstood—the pale face with its hectic bloom, the slight distortion of form which no artifice of dress can wholly conceal, the unhealthy stoop, and the short cough—the effects of hard work and close application to a sedentary employment, upon a tender frame. They turn ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... droops a flower Without the sun or rain; And now at twilight's hectic flush, She sang a wild, ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. My God, Harry, how I worship her!" He was walking up and down the room as he spoke. Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde

... disclosure of which, in demanding so much higher a degree of courage, is so much surer an evidence of love. I touched upon my college indiscretions—upon my extravagances—upon my carousals—upon my debts—upon my flirtations. I even went so far as to speak of a slightly hectic cough with which, at one time, I had been troubled—of a chronic rheumatism—of a twinge of hereditary gout—and, in conclusion, of the disagreeable and inconvenient, but hitherto carefully ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... sorrow and apprehension and death. The fugitives saw not then the safety, nor anticipated the victory. In this picture, beyond and before the hurrying group, stretches the immeasurable, hungry sand. A sad golden-brown haze—such as sometimes comes in our Indian summer, when the hectic autumn rests silent, mournful and hopeless, in the arms of Nature— pervades the plain; while on the horizon far away,—an infinite distance it seems, so strangely spectral are they,—rise the Pyramids, just those awful ghosts against ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... softening. The most striking instance of the beneficial operation of cod-liver oil in phthisis, is to be found in cases in the third stage—even those far advanced, where consumption has not only excavated the lungs, but is rapidly wasting the whole body with copious purulent expectoration, hectic, night-sweats, colliquative diarrhoea, and other elements of that destructive process by which, in a few weeks, the finest and fairest of the human family may be sunk to the grave. The power of staying ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 - Volume 18, New Series, July 3, 1852 • Various

... thronging dreams arise, 7 Awhile forgetful of their pain they gaze, A transient lustre lights their faded eyes, And o'er their cheek the tender hectic plays. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... Northern latitudes, where heated air must be used for nearly three-quarters of the year, the neglect of ventilation is fast causing the health and beauty of our women to disappear. The pallid cheek, or the hectic flush, the angular form and distorted spine, the debilitated appearance of a large portion of our females, which to a stranger, would seem to indicate that they were just recovering from a long illness, all these indications of the ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... O power of youth to feed on pleasant thoughts Spite of conviction! I am old and heartless! Yes, I am old—I have no pleasant dreams— 60 Hectic ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... way of kindness, is justly disliked by society; so the woman Muspratt, culpable as she was, was safe from me. But what of the man Hawk? There no such considerations swayed me. I would interview the man Hawk. I would give him the most hectic ten minutes of his career. I would say things to him the recollection of which would make him start up shrieking in his bed in the small hours of the night. I would arise, and be a man and slay him—take him grossly, full of bread, with ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse

... her. Mother, of course, would not let us associate with her, but she always treated her kindly when she came and did what she could to lighten the burden which was pressing her down to the grave. But, poor child, she was never again the same light-hearted girl. She grew pale and thin and in the hectic flush and faltering tread I read the death sign of early decay, and I felt that my misguided young friend was slowly dying of a broken heart. Then there came a day when we were summoned to her dying bed. Her brothers and sisters were ...
— Trial and Triumph • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... not be over-emphasized. There is often more style and outward effect than real substance. His works excite, but how seldom do they exalt! For he was frequently deficient in depth of emotion and in latent warmth—qualities quite different from the hectic glow and the feverish passion which his French admirers, Tiersot and Boschot, claim to be genuine attributes of musical inspiration, of power to compel universal attention. We of other nations can only firmly dissent. Without question his work has never succeeded in calling forth the ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... Hanbury. He had either never heard of their evil character, or considered that it gave them all the more claims upon his Christian care; and the end of it was, that this rough, untamed, strong giant of a heathen was loyal slave to the weak, hectic, nervous, self-distrustful parson. Gregson had also a kind of grumbling respect for Mr. Horner: he did not quite like the steward's monopoly of his Harry: the mother submitted to that with a better grace, swallowing down her maternal jealousy in the prospect ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell

... twelve days before this fateful day of September 3, 1914, there were approximately 100 German divisions as against seventy-five French, British, and Belgian divisions. But, during those twelve days, French and British mobilization advanced with hectic speed, while, at the same time, Germany was compelled to transfer ten or perhaps fifteen of her divisions to the eastern theater of war. It follows, therefore, that there were about 4,000,000 soldiers in all the armies that confronted each other in the week of September ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... the commencement of the settlement of Naumkeag, or Salem; but the scene was soon changed. During the first winter, about one hundred persons died, and Mr. Higginson was soon seized with a hectic, which terminated his days in August, 1630, aged forty-two. In his last sickness, he was reminded of his benevolent exertions in the service of the Lord Jesus Christ. To consoling suggestions of this kind he replied, "I have been an unprofitable servant, and all my desire is to win Christ, ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward

... successful opening provides a hectic and scrambled scene to the unaccustomed eye. Hastily presented to a few people, Banneker drifted to one side and, seating himself on a wire chair, contentedly assumed the role of onlooker. The air was full ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... made this unlike other such banquets, was that no one could help perceiving how much less the bridegroom was the hero of the day to the tenants than was the hectic young man who presided over the feast, and how all the speeches, however they began in honour of Captain Evelyn, always turned into wistful good ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... druidical origin, is used to avert the danger. In the increase of the March moon, withies of oak and ivy are cut, and twisted into wreaths or circles, which they preserve till next March. After that period, when persons are consumptive, or children hectic, they cause them to pass thrice through these circles. In other cases the cure was more rough, and at least as dangerous as the disease, as will appear from the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Vol. II (of 3) • Walter Scott

... robustness and ballast. Byron, who was at bottom intensely practical, said that Shelley's philosophy was too spiritual and romantic. Hazlitt, himself a Radical, wrote of Shelley: "He has a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic. He is sanguine complexioned and shrill voiced." It was, perhaps, with some recollection of this last-mentioned trait of Shelley the man, that Carlyle wrote of Shelley the poet, that "the sound of him was shrieky," and that he had ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... misfortunes. Henry Meynell was never mentioned, but his handiwork was plainly seen. Kate had rapidly grown old; the look of radiant happiness and trustingness was gone. Her spirits were not altogether depressed, but rather subject to pitiful variations; and at times the hectic excitement of her manner was even more distressing than her fits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... it," Jason said resignedly after a hectic search of the caroj and the surrounding plain. The water-of-power had vanished with Snarbi who, afraid as he was of the steam engine, apparently knew enough from observing Jason fueling the thing that it could not move without the vital liquid. An empty feeling ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey

... irritation and pain are to be removed, but also in pulmonary and bronchial consumption, in which it counteracts effectually the troublesome cough; and I am enabled with perfect truth to express the conviction that Du Barry's Revalenta Arabica is adapted to the cure of incipient hectic complaints and consumption. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 203, September 17, 1853 • Various

... evening dress. He took gingerly the chair his cousin offered him between the hectic Marchant and ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine

... at last for the great concert, and the boys were so excited they could hardly keep still; even Franz, whose cheeks glowed with a brilliant hectic flush, and whose eyes were strangely bright. The hall was crowded. The imperial family was there, together ...
— Standard Selections • Various

... supper done—prepare thee to reply, Clearly and full—I love not mystery." 710 'Twere vain to guess what shook the pious man, Who looked not lovingly on that Divan; Nor showed high relish for the banquet prest, And less respect for every fellow guest. Twas but a moment's peevish hectic passed Along his cheek, and tranquillised as fast: He sate him down in silence, and his look Resumed the calmness which before forsook: The feast was ushered in—but sumptuous fare He shunned as if some poison mingled there. 720 ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... two days dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant little comedy of life at El Pozo had changed to melodrama, crude and strident. They had been attacked by a band of insurrectos, a wing of Villa's hectic army, presumably; the peons, with the exception of the house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy; Richard King had been wounded in his hot-headed defense of his hacienda, shot through the shoulder, and was running a temperature; the telephone wires were cut; infinitely ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... Ivanovna at once. She was a rather tall, slim and graceful woman, terribly emaciated, with magnificent dark brown hair and with a hectic flush in her cheeks. She was pacing up and down in her little room, pressing her hands against her chest; her lips were parched and her breathing came in nervous broken gasps. Her eyes glittered as in fever and looked about with a harsh immovable stare. And that consumptive and excited face ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... noise was tumultuous. Every plane in a condition to fly was out on the landing field, now brightly lighted by the burning buildings all about. There was frantic, hectic activity everywhere. The secretaries of The Master were rescuing what records they could, and growing cold with terror. In the confusion of spreading flames and the noise of roaring conflagrations the stopping of the motor up aloft had passed unnoticed. In the headquarters of The Master there ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... fun they had talking of their adventure, no one but Stephen Strong remarked the feverish unrest in her eyes, or the bright, hectic ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn

... why there is nothing hectic about the hordes of Native Sons who nightly motor about San Francisco, who fill its theatres and restaurants. An after-theatre group in San Francisco is as different from the tallowy, gas-bred, after-theatre groups on Broadway as it is possible to imagine. ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin

... examined, therefore, from the depths of his hiding-place, the nature of that mysterious malady which bent and aged more mortally every day a man but lately so full of life and a desire to live. He remarked upon the cheeks of Athos the hectic hue of fever, which feeds upon itself; slow fever, pitiless, born in a fold of the heart, sheltering itself behind that rampart, growing from the suffering it engenders, at once cause and effect of a perilous situation. ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... the spring of 1860 the weather came off exquisitely fine. It was like a hectic flush—the deceptive seeming of health on the cheek of the consumptive. It was a spring without rain, in which the sun was shining beautiful and bright, in which the evenings were balmy and pleasant, and the road good; but to be followed ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler

... pale wan fragile mother, working, but with the baby on her knee, and looking as if care and toil had brought her to skin and bone, though still with sweet eyes and a lovely smile; the father, tall and picturesque, with straight handsome features, but with a hectic colour, wasted cheek, and lustrous eye, that were sad earnests of the future. He was still under forty, his wife some years less; and elder than either in its expression of wasted suffering was the countenance of the little girl of thirteen years old who ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... coughed, and could not finish the sentence. There was a hectic flush in his cheek and his thin, graceful frame shook violently from head to foot. Unable to speak for the moment, he waved his hand in a menacing gesture. The Wanderer shook his head ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... Linen Nurse. "Servants?" Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon's hectic face. "Why, there aren't any servants," she explained patiently. "I've dismissed every one of them. We're doing ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... in the conservatory, musing over the gloomy anticipations her dreams had cast over her thoughts, Louis Marie came towards her. A beam of joy lit up her hectic cheek; she impressed a kiss on the forehead of her darling son, and playfully reproved him for the dreams that gave her ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly

... slowly. Sometimes the artist's hand so trembled with weakness that he could not proceed with his work. More than once Natalie saw the brush suddenly fall from his nerveless fingers. He was very weak in these days, and the spot of hectic red glowed brightly on ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... persons were women with sounding names and the solid backing of much money conspicuously in evidence—matrons of the younger and more giddy generation which was just then so busily engaged in providing material for the most hectic chapters of London's post-war social history. But Sofia was scarcely qualified to be critical or to guess that they were climbers equally with herself, and that if their footing had been of older establishment the name of Vassilyevski would have rung sinister echoes in their ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... floors will not be polished mirrors nor skating-rinks. They will be just plain and common hardwood floors. Beautiful carpets are not beautiful to the mind that knows they are filled with germs and bacilli. They are no more beautiful than the hectic flush of fever, or the silvery skin of leprosy. Besides, carpets enslave. A thing that enslaves is a monster, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... Trubert, invariably made this same reply to all who troubled about his health, less by way of informing them of his welfare than to cut short any discussion on the subject. At twenty-eight, he had a parched skin, thin hair, hectic cheeks and bent shoulders. He was an optician on the Quai des Orfevres, and owned a very old house which he had given up in '91 to a superannuated clerk in order to devote his energies to the discharge of his municipal duties. His ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France

... example, he was so gentle that to the untutored eye he might seem almost timid. He had viewed the rise of the motor car with all the misgivings of a lover of the Old Ways, long refusing to accompany his wife on her hectic flights, but at last he had consented to buy an electric. For three dreadful weeks he ran it in agony or apprehension. It was not that he might run into people: there was no danger there, for even if he ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis

... plains were vast, toilsome and tedious the way, Developing soon the fever germs that within her latent lay, And daily the velvet azure eyes with a brighter lustre burned, And the hectic flush of the waxen cheek to a deeper ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon

... place is scarcely solemn. Its dreary barocco emblems mar the dignity of death. A bulky Pieta by Gian Bologna, with Madonna's face unfinished, towers up and crowds the narrow cell. Religion has evanished from this late Renaissance art, nor has the afterglow of Guido Reni's hectic piety yet overflushed it. Chilled by the stifling humid sense of an extinct race here entombed in its last representative, we gladly emerge from the sepulchral vault into ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... For several hectic minutes the air was thick with buns, It was almost as bad, so he told me, as the shelling of the Huns, But our gallant Tennysonian held on until a clout In the eye from a metal teapot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various

... wide professional experience leads me to diagnose as the fact that you're probably waiting for Jim!" said the doctor, gravely. "There's a certain hectic flush, an intermittent pulse, which convinces me of your painful state, when coupled with the restlessness ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... of Autumn, the height of the Carnival of Decay, the roses have got inflammation in their blushes, an uncanny hectic tinge, through their ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... marshal's inflexibility. He was quite ill, too, and what with fever and agitation, his brain was in a whirl. He leaned against the chair, faint and dispirited. The painful cough, the harbinger of that fatal malady which had already brought a sister to an early grave, oppressed him, and the hectic glowed upon his pale cheeks. The marshal approached him, and laid his hand gently on ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood

... too much for his enfeebled body? Had they found him only to lose him at once for ever? Sir Thomas and his wife approached the bed with beating hearts. No; there was life still; the lips moved, and the hectic of the fever returned to the cheeks. Then the eyes opened wide, and Frank sprang up into a ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson

... that moonlit night in August Fate spun her web, which she called "The Purple Slipper," rapidly, and for a number of the people involved life became very hectic. The center of the whirl was Mr. Adolph Meyers, though he was safely functioning with power behind the throne occupied by Mr. Godfrey Vandeford's nonchalant ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess

... experience of idle panic and idle regret, or whether you meanly prefer to palliate a servile imitation of their frailty by a paltry affectation of their repentance. It is now for you to show that you are not carried away by the same hectic delusions, to acts of which no tears can wash away the fatal ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... friend who might venture in at any time for a dish of private chit-chat with the lady of the Hall. Into this apartment I was confidentially drawn by Mrs. Hill on the morning after my moonlight conversation with John, as with heavy eyes and hectic cheeks, but with a saucy tongue in reserve, specially sharpened, and a chin held at the extreme angle of self-complacency and no toleration of interference from others, I was sailing majestically down-stairs to put my melancholy finger as usual into the pie of the pleasures ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland

... cutting out with scissors the hussars from a sheet of Epinal, his poor mamma almost frightened him, as she leaned her elbow upon the pillow and gazed at him so long and so sadly, while her thin white hands restlessly pushed back her beautiful, disordered hair, and two red hectic spots ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee

... have him use Wims. Why? Suddenly, into his mind flashed the scene of the general calling Wims from behind the tree and he knew what it was that had been screaming for attention at the back of his mind these last hectic minutes. No one had mentioned Wims' name within earshot of the general and yet Fyfe had called Wims ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia

... That weighed upon her gentle dust: a cloud Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom Heaven gives its favourites[481]—early death—yet shed A sunset charm around her, and illume With hectic light, the Hesperus of the dead, Of her consuming ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... wars: they loved, of course, and the deeper, because secretly and without permission: they were too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter; still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needful to each other, or more united. But—a hacking cough—a hectic cheek—a wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower: henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was—so thought he, as many ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... departed, and a sad change had come over the once hale, stalwart man. After we had waited some time, a feeble, stooping figure, attired in a long blue flannel gown, moved slowly into the room. His gray hair was unkempt, his blue eyes were still keen and piercing, and a bright hectic spot of red appeared on each of his hollow cheeks. His hands were tremulous, and his voice deep and husky. After a few personal inquiries the old man launched out into a most extraordinary and characteristic harangue on the wretched degeneracy of these evil days. The prophet, ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... prince, if I can only meet With wonder these tumultuous ecstacies. Not thus I looked to find Don Philip's son. A hectic red burns on your pallid cheek, And your lips quiver with a feverish heat. What must I think, dear prince? No more I see The youth of lion heart, to whom I come The envoy of a brave and suffering people. For now I stand not here as Roderigo— Not as the playmate of the stripling ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... into the hectic grievances of the pampered and spoiled child. His family was just getting a foothold in Society (with an almost holy emphasis on the word) and now they were disgraced. All was up. Their new, precariously held acquaintances would drop them. In his petulant grief he ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... circumstances above described. Woman alone, perhaps, can steadily maintain the clear vision of what the beloved one really is, and can patiently view the wearisome ebullitions of ill-temper and discontent as symptoms equally physical with a cough or a hectic flush. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... though in the intensity of its pure fire the mere earthly body which had contained it were being re-absorbed and consumed. Sometimes in the evenings her pulse quickened and her cheeks flushed with the hectic touch of fever; it was the only symptom of physical disorder I ever detected in her;—but even that was slight,—the temperature of her system was hardly affected by it. So she lay, her body fading, day after day and hour after hour. Madame Jeannel was deeply concerned, for she was a good ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... the jury looked a trifle pinched, though his cheeks bore two spots of hectic color. Mr. Franklin, drawn to the court by curiosity, happened to glance at him once, and found him gazing at Furneaux in ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... gradual defection from piety, will in time draw after it all the bad consequences of more active vice; for whether mounds and fences are suddenly destroyed by a sweeping torrent, or worn away through gradual neglect, the effect is equally destructive. As a rapid fever and a consuming hectic are alike fatal to our natural health, so are flagrant immorality and torpid indolence to our ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More

... the junior bar he used to be. Decline, poor chap. That hectic flush spells finis for a man. Touch and go with him. What's in the wind, I ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... not read the papers. Contrary to our usual habit we had gone about a pressing piece of work without a glance at any of the three dailies laid to hand in their usual place on the library table. "They are here on the table," I replied, wondering as much at the hectic flush which now enlivened her features as at the extreme paleness that had marked ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... learning laid aside. Thus synods oft concern for faith conceal, And for important nothings show a zeal: The drooping sciences neglected pine, And Paean's beams with fading lustre shine. No readers here with hectic looks are found, Nor eyes in rheum, through midnight watching, drowned; The lonely edifice in sweats complains That nothing there but ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... looked stern-white like Media's pearls; but cast a green and yellow glare; rays from emeralds, crossing rays from many a topaz. In those beams, so sinister, all present looked cadaverous: Abrazza's cheek alone beamed bright, but hectic. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... the bed, her hands beating wildly against her heart and a hectic spot burning on ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford

... a somewhat hectic series of events at Windles, a country house in Hampshire, where Billie's ideals still block the way and Sam comes on ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... cold-blooded; it was as passionless as chess. And it was about then that Cecille began to draw nearer and nearer in spirit, like a bird hypnotized by a snake. The simile is hectic, I know. But it was ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... to see the wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest good fortune that the year of Frances's reception was also that of the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival. For the preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising of the young Chesterton of 1904. Requests poured in, for lectures, for articles, for introductions to books. "Are there no other Catholics to do things?" Frances asked me rather plaintively. Of these years Monsignor Knox said later, "his ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... when neither train nor traveller had suffered chastening; sessions of a high animation, as I recast them, but at the same time of mortal intensities of lassitude. The elements here indeed are much confused and mixed—I must have known that discipline of the hectic interest and the extravagant strain in relation to Rhinebeck only; an etape, doubtless, on the way to New York, for the Albany kinship, but the limit to our smaller patiences of any northward land-journey. And yet not the young fatigue, I repeat, but the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... not the season suggested to the Atlantic reader under that title. The sharply defined boundaries of the wet and dry seasons were prefigured in the clear outlines of the distant hills. In the dry atmosphere the decay of vegetation was too rapid for the slow hectic which overtakes an Eastern landscape, or else Nature was too practical for such thin disguises. She merely turned the Hippocratic face to the spectator, with the old diagnosis of Death in her ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... hope," and who, since they expect that "the deficiencies of last sentence will be supplied by the next," have been recommended by Dr. Samuel Johnson to "attend to the History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia." They are characterised by a hectic hopefulness. Nothing damps them. They rise from the ruins of one abortive sentence, to launch forth into another with unabated vigour. They have all the manner of an orator. From the tone of their voice, you would expect a splendid ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... she ran or played in the garden, as she once could for hours, she became soon so tired and languid. He had heard Miss Ophelia speak often of a cough, that all her medicaments could not cure; and even now that fervent cheek and little hand were burning with hectic fever; and yet the thought that Eva's words suggested had never come ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... it looked, through the small, smoky window, to the eyes of the young and beautiful woman who lay dying of hectic fever in a dark, musty room back of the shop of Mrs. Fipps, the milliner, in lower Main Street—cold and friendless ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... habits, however unfortunate they proved to him they did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us. No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopin or—even in our own time—of O. Henry, and others who might be named. In none of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation show itself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the varying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even as penetrating benevolence came from ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... desire, nor desire hope. We may expect misfortune, sickness, poverty, while from these evils we would fain escape. Bending over the couches of the sick and suffering, we may desire their restoration to health, while the hectic flush and the rapid beating of the heart assure us that no effort of kindness or skill can prolong their days upon the earth. Hope is directed to some future good, and it implies not only an ardent desire that our future may be fair and unclouded, but an ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams

... plowed along the road, weaving in and out among ammunition wagons, artillery caissons, infantry, cavalry, bicyclists—all in a dense cloud of dust. Troops were everywhere in small numbers. Machine guns, covered with shrubbery, were thick on the road and in the woods. There was a decidedly hectic movement toward the front, and it was being carried out at high speed without confusion or disorder. It was a sight to remember. All along the road we were cheered both as Americans and in the belief that we were British. Whenever we were stopped at ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson

... Lady Merton; 'her features are less prominent, and her colour has not that fixed hectic look that both the others have, ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... effect on a lady that a very piquant and interesting, though scarcely pretty, female face would on a man. I have mentioned his dark locks—they were brushed sideways above a white and sufficiently expansive forehead; his cheek had a rather hectic freshness; his features might have done well on canvas, but indifferently in marble: they were plastic; character had set a stamp upon each; expression re-cast them at her pleasure, and strange metamorphoses ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... hectic uprush about pearly breasts, and honey-sources, and musk-scented arbours, closing with "Your Beduin Boy ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... approaching. The fields were empty, the leaves were beginning to fall, and many a hectic person felt the scissors on his life's thread. John, too, seemed to be suffering under the influence of the approaching equinox; those who saw him at this time said he looked particularly disturbed and talked to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... youth who succeeded him in exhorting this extraordinary convocation, Ephraim Macbriar by name, was hardly twenty years old; yet his thin features already indicated, that a constitution, naturally hectic, was worn out by vigils, by fasts, by the rigour of imprisonment, and the fatigues incident to a fugitive life. Young as he was, he had been twice imprisoned for several months, and suffered many severities, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... hectic quarters, with the tide of victory or defeat now surging towards Bliss—now towards Sloan, the battle raged. As play after play of brilliance or superbrilliance flashed forth, the stands alternately groaned ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... preferred the pleasures of the senses to the vaguer comforts of philosophy, he was not without a profound admiration for the man who, as he believed, had deliberately chosen to forfeit the joy of life. Roger Adams impressed him to-night as a peculiarly happy man—not with the hectic happiness he himself had sought—but with a secure, a reposeful, an indestructible possession—the happiness which comes not through the illusion of desire, but which is bound up in the peace of an eternal reconciliation. The ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a day of general ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... Day shakes upon his central seat and turns up his hectic front in dumb questionings of despair. He yearns for sleep to seal his ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer

... borough;—well thought of. I will go to Avenel's. By-the-by, by-the-by, the squire might as well keep me still in the entail after Frank, supposing Frank die childless. This love affair may keep him long from marrying. His hand was very hot,—a hectic colour; those strong-looking fellows often go off in rapid decline, especially if anything preys on their minds,—their minds ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... men sent on board our ship which made our number 40. James Duffer died at 4 o'clock p.m. with Hectic fever. Many of the men are very low. Bellew and Collins were sent to our ship which augments our ...
— Journal of an American Prisoner at Fort Malden and Quebec in the War of 1812 • James Reynolds

... that the clerks were not wrong when they prophesied the death of their employer at no distant day. Since the flight of Cecily, the notary was hardly to be recognized. Although his visage was of a frightful thinness, and of a cadaverous hue, a hectic flush colored his hollow cheeks; a nervous shivering, except when interrupted by convulsive spasms, agitated his frame continually; his bony hands were dry and burning; his large green spectacles concealed ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue

... Stapp had gone, Mrs. March went back to her guest. Lou Baxter had fallen asleep with her head pillowed on the soft plush back of her chair. Mrs. March looked at the hollow, hectic cheeks and the changed, wasted features, and her bright brown ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... ready, we mounted and trekked off to a so-called "rest camp" near the town, most uneasy and hectic. But food late that evening restored our hilarity. A few hours' sleep and we moved off once more into the night, the horses' feet sounding loud and harsh on the unending French cobbles. By 8 a.m. we were all packed into this train. Now we are passing by ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... are strong. Look at those tables of mixed tints of which artist-authors are so fond, and tell us whether they always bear scrutiny—surely not. Admirable, perfect as these tints may be in an artistic sense, how often is their beauty like the hectic flush of consumption, which carries with it the seeds of a certain death. Will that orange where Indian yellow figures ever see old age, or that green with indigo, or purple with cochineal lake? Will they not rather spread over ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... along the river side, How she doth whisper to that aged Dame, And, after looking round the champaign wide, Shows her a knife.—"What feverous hectic flame Burns in thee, child?—What good can thee betide, That thou should'st smile again?"—The evening came, 350 And they had found Lorenzo's earthy bed; The flint was there, the ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats

... of about thirty, with somewhat sallow cheeks on which there was now a hectic flush, a high-pitched forehead that seemed to have contracted into a perpetual frown, and colourless eyes. The son of a well-known barrister, he had tried his luck in the City after leaving Cambridge. In a few years the respectable income he had started ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... the other way, to his own office, and Mr. Galloway lingered somewhere behind. Jenkins—truehearted Jenkins, in the black handkerchief still—was doubly respectful to Arthur, and rose to welcome him; a faint hectic of pleasure illumining his face at the termination of ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood

... himself, as with straining eyes he gazed upon that first outlier of the New World which held his all. His cheeks were thin and wasted, and the hectic spot on each glowed crimson in the crimson light of the setting sun. A few minutes more, and the rainbows of the West were gone; emerald and topaz, amethyst and ruby, had faded into silver-gray; ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... of the dullest. Nothing else was mentioned at any breakfast-table where a morning paper was taken that day; hardly anything for many breakfasts to follow. In homes containing boys who had actually studied Greek under the mysterious Professor Nicolovius at Mimer's School, discussion grew almost hectic; while at Mrs. Paynter's, where everybody was virtually a leading actor in the moving drama, the excitement closely ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... sigh was heavily breathed. Then, in a moment, the paralysis fell from her. The dullness of her eyes gave place to a sheen of excitement, and her perfect cheeks assumed a faint, hectic flush. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... made his way out of the crowd into the water. He was a stranger to the place, and the spectators looked on in silent surprise. Before Smith had dipped him in the stream and blessed him another man came forward, pale and thin, with a hectic flush upon his cheeks. He was a well-known resident of Manchester; all knew that his days on earth must be few. A low howl began to rise, loudest on the outskirts of the crowd, but the fact that the man was dying kept ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... him any harm, that was the point. He had tested the doctor's statement and found it incorrect. He had spent three hectic days and nights in New York, and—after a reasonable interval—had felt much the same as usual. And since then he had imbibed each night, and nothing had happened. What it came to was that the doctor was a chump and a blighter. Simply that and ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... had ceased to travel, and were at leisure. I got into a hollow which had a floor of hoary lichen, with bronze hummocks of moss. In this moment of pause it had assumed a look of what we call antiquity. The valley was not abundant with vegetation, but enamelled and jewelled. A more concentrated, hectic, and volatile essence sent up stalks, blades, and sprays, with that direction and restraint which perfection needs. More than in a likelier and fecund spot, in this valley the ichor showed the ardour and flush ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... pages she taught her own children to read. The plan was communicated to Mr. Day, who entered into it eagerly; and an educational library seemed about to be prepared for the benefit of a far-away household in the heart of Ireland. But a hectic disorder, that had threatened Mrs. Edgeworth's life while yet a child, now returned upon her with increased virulence; and the kind and beautiful mistress of Edgeworthstown was compelled to forego this and every other earthly avocation. Mr. Day expanded his little tale ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... fashion like a lute, had but the groin Been sever'd, where it meets the forked part. Swoln dropsy, disproportioning the limbs With ill-converted moisture, that the paunch Suits not the visage, open'd wide his lips Gasping as in the hectic man for drought, One towards the chin, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri



Words linked to "Hectic" :   feverish



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