"Starched" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... taken from the licence of arms, which permit, and almost authorize, the greatest disorders in a conquered country. The pleasures of Asia, and the commerce of infidels, aided not a little to debauch the Portuguese, as starched and regular as they naturally are. The want of spiritual directors contributed largely to this growing mischief. There were not four preachers, in all the Indies, nor any one priest without the walls of Goa; insomuch, that in many fortified places whole years ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... panuelo: A starched neckerchief folded stiffly over the shoulders, fastened in front and falling in a point behind: the most distinctive portion of the customary ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... building art gradually declined, with only a few flashes of brilliant light in the works of Inigo Jones and Wren. The Commonwealth was prudish in art as in manners, and the Restoration was a reign of revel and wild license. The social worlds of William and Mary and of Queen Anne, stiff, starched, and formal, left their impress upon the buildings of their day, which were mostly of a domestic character. The Free Classic of the Georgian reigns followed,—more refined in sentiment, delicate but severe in outline, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... being of a frailer fabric, they gave way beneath the vigorous treatment to which they were subjected, and exhibited mere wrecks of their former selves. Not a single article was wearable which had passed through the severe ordeal of being starched and ironed by Deborah, and what was still more lamentable, many of them could not even, like an antique painting or statue, ...
— The Wedding Guest • T.S. Arthur
... queen in a play. Moreover, as the clear-eyed Miss Morgan remarked, the very least they looked was ambassadorial. Sydney was an Amberson exaggerated, more pompous than gracious; too portly, flushed, starched to a shine, his stately jowl furnished with an Edward the Seventh beard. Amelia, likewise full-bodied, showed glittering blond hair exuberantly dressed; a pink, fat face cold under a white-hot tiara; a solid, cold bosom under a white-hot necklace; great, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... lazily surveyed the crowd. Every second cab he passed contained an immaculate man going out to dinner, sitting bolt upright, with a severe expression of countenance, and surveying the world with steady eyes over an unyielding rampart of starched collar. Reggie exchanged nods with various acquaintances. Presently he passed an elderly gentleman with a red face and small side whiskers. The elderly gentleman stared him in the face, and ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... known a mother's love. Her mother died when she was a few weeks old, and she had been confided to the care of two maiden aunts—excellent ladies, both of them; good beyond expression; correct almost to a fault; but prim, starched, and extremely self-possessed and judicious, so much so that they were injudicious enough to repress some of the best impulses of their natures, under the impression that a certain amount of dignified ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... to a consciousness that the place was flooded with indubitable and undoubted sunshine. To be sure, it was not the sharp, hard sunshine we have in America, which scours and bleaches all it touches, until the whole world has the look of having just been clear-starched and hot-ironed. It was a softened, smoke-edged, pastel-shaded sunshine; nevertheless it was plainly ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... said Ned, sympathetically, determining to sympathise a pound-note. Starched shirts did not count to him personally but he understood that the town and the bush ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... him than she knew that he had come braced to try the conclusion with her. He sat himself before her in silence. His waistcoat was white, his neck-cloth white, his collar starched and high; his thick light hair was carefully oiled according to the fashion of the day, and brushed with curling locks upon the sides of the brow. At this critical hour Susannah observed him more narrowly than ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... been built with reference to transmitting draughts on suffocating nights for the benefit of packed audiences; and everybody gasped for breath, though everybody fanned—that is, everybody who had a fan, a newspaper, a hat, or a starched handkerchief. Mollie had neither fan, newspaper, hat, nor handkerchief, and yet she of all the audience gasped unawares. She was stifled, but happy. Elbows and bad air might do their worst; her body suffered, but her spirit soared. She was lifted above her neighbors, into an atmosphere ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... Dalecarlian lace, made by the women of Dalecarlia. This is a coarse kind of lace, and is sewn on caps, &c., and, although highly starched, is never washed, for fear of destroying its coffee-coloured tint, which, it appears, is as much prized now by the Swedish rustics as it was by English ladies ...
— Beeton's Book of Needlework • Isabella Beeton
... was a source of great enjoyment to her, and many happy hours she spent within the enclosure, which old Donald had built so securely that not even a chick could trespass to harm the sprouting seeds. Early spring saw her with tucked-up skirt, a starched sun-bonnet on her head, and hoe or rake in her hand, availing herself of every quiet hour in the day to plant and mark out the beds. Then followed a ceaseless watchfulness, throughout the hot summer, to regulate the watering and weeding, ...
— Nancy McVeigh of the Monk Road • R. Henry Mainer
... folly, as well as to a good deal of human wickedness. In the department of dress, she had a name in her own sex and age as illustrious as that of Brummel among dandies in the beginning of this century. As he was the inventor of the starched cravat, she was his precursor in the invention of the starched ruff, or, as it is generally said, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 - Volume 17, New Series, June 19, 1852 • Various
... had unconsciously laid aside her fan, lifted her mantilla from her head with both hands, and, drawing it around her shoulders and under her lifted chin, had crossed it over her bosom with a certain prim, automatic gesture, as if it had been the starched kerchief of some remote Puritan ancestress. With her arms still unconsciously crossed, she stooped rigidly, picked up her fan with three fingers, as if it had been a prayer-book, and, with a slight inclination of her bared head, with its accurately parted brown ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... consideration that, in that case, the cost of supporting them would probably be transferred from the grim Doctor's shoulders to those of the community. Nevertheless, they did what they could. Maidenly ladies, prim and starched, in one or two instances called upon the Doctor—the two children meanwhile being in the graveyard at play—to give him Christian advice as to the management of his charge. But, to confess the truth, the Doctor's reception ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Antonio Perez, whose family—having lost his wife—consisted of a lovely daughter, named Magdalena, and a less beautiful but still charming niece, Juanita. The housekeeping and the care of the girls were committed to a starched old duenna, Donna Margarita, whose vinegar aspect and sharp tongue might well keep at a distance the boldest gallants of the court and camp. For the rest, some half dozen workmen and servitors, and a couple of stout Asturian serving wenches made up the establishment of the wealthy artisan. ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... Mrs. Morton hurried in with a fluttering sheet of paper in her hand. She was a voluminous woman in a stiffly starched house dress, everything about her as clean as a new pin, and a pair of silver-bowed spectacles pushed up to her fast graying hair. She was a wholesome, hearty, motherly looking woman, and Nan Sherwood was attracted to her ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... to prim, starched scholastic life at Palgrave must have been the smiling world, and the land flowing with oil and wine, in which they found themselves basking! The vintage was so abundant that year that the country people could not find vessels to contain it. 'The roads covered with teams of casks, ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... They were the most self-sacrificing women in Asia, the most devout, the most useful. Government gave hospitals and doctors into their hands; they took the whole charge of certain schools. They differed in complexion, some of the newly arrived being delightfully fresh and pink under their starched bandeaux. But they were all official, they all walked discreetly and directly about their business, with a jangle of keys in the folds of their robes, immensely organised, immensely under orders. Hilda, when she had time, had the keenest ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... which her dear foot has kicked! Never! But, perhaps, I will have it ironed. The iron has entered into my soul, and perhaps, it would be doing more good on my hat. Yes, I will have it ironed. It does look a little limp. Ironed or starched—what matter, when my darling is gone, and left me with no information as ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... of thyme—my waistcoat of bergamot, and my inexpressibles of musk. I was a perfect civet for perfumery. My coat, cut in the jemmy fashion, I buttoned to suffocation; but 'pon honour, believe me, sir, no stays, and my shirt neck had been starched per order, to the consistence of tin. In short, to be brief, I found, or fancied myself killing—a most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... compactly, as it were; seemed more the master of all his physical expressions. He was dressed like a magnate who was also a person of taste. There was a flower in the lapel of his well-shaped frock-coat, and the rustle of his starched and spotless white waistcoat murmured pleasantly ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... illiterate guttersnipe. He did not know he was lonely. He did not want to play with the other children in the Terrace. But he did know that for some mysterious reason or other they did not want to play with him. The trim nursemaids drew their starched and shining darlings to one side when he passed, and he in turn scowled at them with a fierce contempt to which, all unknown, was added two drops of shame and bitterness. But even among the real guttersnipes of the neighbourhood ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... taken freely, as it is well to remember that the native washerman—the well-abused "Dobie"—has a marvellous skill in producing a saw-like rim to the starched collar and cuff of the newest shirt; while the elegant and delicate lace and embroidery, with which the fair are wont to embellish their underwear, take strange and unforeseen patterns at the hands of the skilled workmen. It is surprising what an effect can be obtained by tying ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... the surrounding hills, had numbered more than a century of unscathed and undiminished beauty, and had as yet escaped the rude pruning of the woodman's axe. The morning habit of the noble Constance fitted tightly to the throat, where it was terminated by a full ruff of starched muslin, and the waist was encircled by a wide band of black crape, from which the drapery descended in massive folds to her feet. She pressed the soft green turf with a more measured step than was her wont, as if the body shared the mind's sad heaviness. ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... very imposing with its four legs carved in the shape of lions' paws, and a huge side-board to match, stood in the oblong room, the floor of which had been polished by three men the day before. On the table, which was covered with a fine, starched cloth, stood a silver coffeepot full of aromatic coffee, a sugar basin, a jug of fresh cream, and a bread basket filled with fresh rolls, rusks, and biscuits; and beside the plate lay the last number of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a newspaper, and ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... pretty girl, for a king's ransom. As soon as afternoon parade was dismissed, we would dive for our quarters, and re-don our "civvies" until next parade. The "cocky" would be resplendent again in his soft collar and red tie, and the city clerk in starched collar ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... The Master Man was so stirred by half-contemptuous humour at the sycophancy and snobbery of his vain slave, who could make a salad out of anything edible, that, caring little what men were, so long as they did his work for him, he once wrote a cheque for two thousand pounds on the starched cuff of his henchman's "biled shirt" at a dinner ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... In his place I should have thought Mlle. de Chaulieu, meeting me under the limes, a cold, calculating coquette, with starched manners. No, that is not love, it is playing with fire. I am still fond of Felipe, but I am calm and at my ease with him now. No more obstacles! What a terrible thought! It is all ebb-tide within, and I fear to question my heart. His mistake was in concealing the ardor of his love; ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... big utilities, finance, shipping, railroads, telegraphs. The United Grain Growers were to be but a helpless giant in the hands of Jack Proletariat. Parliament was to be superseded by Direct Action. The A.F.L. was to become obsolete. Trades Unions were to be taken over and painted red. Citizens in starched collars were to become comrades in shirt sleeves, or enemies. Political parties would be reconstructed. The "workers" would own the country. The British Empire would be shaken into Soviets. The Army ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... fire-place sits the old man in his hard arm-chair, his hands folded, and his spectacles awry, as he sonorously snores away the time. Opposite him sits the old lady, a little, toothless dame, with angular features half hidden in a stiffly starched white cap, her fingers flying over her knitting-work, as precisely and perseveringly she "seams," "narrows," and "widens." At the old lady's right hand stands a cherry table, on which burns a yellow tallow candle that occasionally the ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 4 • Various
... communicative. Said she: "I never knew before that a man could look like fresh cambric. Dear me! his head and his face and his little whiskers, his white scarf, his white waistcoat, and all his clothes, and himself, seem just washed and ironed and starched. I looked ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... house for him, mended and pressed his uniforms, washed and starched his linen, quarreled with the orderly who attended him, and drove him to ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... well disposed towards her new guest, because she had not been originally consulted as to her visit; and even the good-natured Miss Cordsen frightened Madeleine at first, with her tall, spare figure and well-starched cap-strings. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... to be the mouth. Commencing at the right ear, it swept with a terrific chasm to the left—the short pendants which she wore in either auricle continually bobbing into the aperture. She made, however, every exertion to keep her mouth closed and look dignified, in a dress consisting of a newly starched and ironed shroud coming up close under her chin, with a ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... little, intimately, of babies; in the streets and parks she met them, and said: "What sweets! What precious things!" And she had thought more than once how beautiful it would be to own one, sitting in its well-built perambulator with the clean white lacy covers and cushions, and the starched nurse ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... woman, in a starched cap, who talked incessantly, showed him a number of rooms in a great stone building. He chose a garret among the chimney-stacks, and lit a fire, and ordered a newspaper and a bottle of brandy. He sat down to read in loneliness. As he surmised, the murder was printed among the "Faits ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... cost my conductor's one hand an arduous wrench to lay open the lock of the outer door, in front of which he had first to dislodge a very dingy female, attired in an earth-coloured gown, that seemed as if starched with ashes; and as the rusty hinges creaked, and the door fell against the wall, we became sensible of a damp, unwholesome smell, like the breath of a charnel-house, which issued from the interior. The place had been shut up for nearly two ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... mass of the English people—for after all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass—in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I suspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince Consort,—white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... and hearty, so profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own methods and the uselessness of all others, with such a ready invention, and such an inundation of animal spirits that he could flood any company, no matter how starched or listless, with an unbounded appetite for ball-games and bean-games. How long it will last in the hands of others than the projector remains to be seen, especially as some of his feats are more exhausting than average gymnastics; but, in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... screwed up and her fists clinched, while her mother polished her face faithfully with a wet, soapy end of a towel, and combed the snarls out of her hair. When it was all done, her cheeks being very red and shiny, and her hair very damp and smooth, when she was arrayed in her clean starched white tier, and had her Shaker tied on with an emphatic square bow, she stood in the door and drank in the parting instructions. Her eyes were wide and intent, and her mouth drooped soberly at the ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... skirts are at one time only two and a half yards around and at another time five and a half or eight yards around. An Elizabethan gentleman might be too poor to dress well, but he would squander his last penny in getting his ruff starched. Lyly's style bristles with extravagances of the starched ruff sort, which only serve to call attention to the intellectual deficiencies in the ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... section of the Big House by way of a massive, hewn- timber, iron-studded door that let in at the foot of what seemed a donjon keep. The floor was cement, and doors let off in various directions. One, opening to a Chinese in the white apron and starched cap of a chef, emitted at the same time the low hum of a dynamo. It was this that deflected Forrest from his straight path. He paused, holding the door ajar, and peered into a cool, electric-lighted cement room where stood a long, glass-fronted, glass-shelved refrigerator ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... at frequent overtime as the week workers are. Besides, though obliged to stay in the work-room, they are frequently seated throughout their waiting time, which sometimes lasts for four or five hours. I saw one woman about to be confined, who sometimes starched shirts until two in the morning, after arriving at the laundry at half past seven on the ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... drunken fiddler who earned his livelihood by playing for the dances the young people of Olney sometimes got up. He was anticipating quite a windfall from the infair it was confidently expected would be given by Mrs. Markham in honor of her son's marriage; and Eunice herself had washed and starched and ironed the white waist she intended to wear on the same occasion. Of course she knew she would have to wait and tend and do the running, she said to Melinda, to whom she confided her thoughts, but after the supper was over she surely might have one little dance, if with ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... evening dress, whose bronzed skin, square shoulders and easy stride gave one the idea that he was a good deal more accustomed to the free and easy costume of the Bush or the Veld or the Mining Camp than to the swallow-tails and starched linen ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... sturdy boy. But he was six feet two now and I had wasted to a shadow. Perry Thomas had a speech prepared. He is our orator, our prize debater, our township statesman, and his frock-coat tightly buttoned across his chest, his unusually high and stiffly starched collar, his repeated coughing as he hovered on the outskirts of the crowd, told me plainly that he had an address to make. Henry Holmes, indeed, asked me to stand still just one minute, and I divined instantly that he was working in the interest of oratory; ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... note first of all. And if you only knew how my wristbands are plaguing me you'd be very sorry. They're too much starched, and would come down like mittens; and now I've turned them up, they're just like two horrid china cups upside down, inside my coat, and I'm afraid to write for fear of breaking them. And I've a week's ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... they went: a small dark girl garbed as no woman was ever garbed in a fashion-plate, a tall copper-brown man all but humorously grotesque in a ready-made suit of clothes that were far from a fit and the first starched shirt and collar he had ever worn. Laughable unqualifiedly, this red man tricked out in the individuality-destroying dress of the white brother would have been to an observer who had not the key to the situation; but to one who knew the motive of the alteration ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... leaving day came Sister Helen Vincula put a clean stiff-starched blue-checked apron on Bessie Bell, and they walked together to the Mall where the band ...
— Somebody's Little Girl • Martha Young
... together. If he watched long enough he was sure he should recognize one that fitted into his picture of the day when he had asked for Undine. And at length a face came out of the twilight: a freckled face, benevolently bent over him under a starched cap. He had not seen the face for a long time, but suddenly it took shape and fitted ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... lank, In scuffling circle or in mural rank, Of misery mechanic They look the wooden symbols; nought to show That even well-starched linen's sheeny snow Veils ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 February 15, 1890 • Various
... he would, and mother and I would stand and listen to him and try not to laugh. 'Lost, stolen, or strayed, a little witch-girl in a clean white frock, rather too much starched; a frilled cape that crackles when she moves, and a pretty broad-brimmed hat.' Well, Fluffy, what does that mysterious look mean? you are very rude to interrupt the old crier," and Fern tried to frown, while Fluff ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Revolution? I'm astonished at you, Mirandy. When I used to be at the Dales', in Mount Vernon Street, in thirty-seven, Mrs. Charles Atterbury Brice used to come there in her carriage, a-callin'. She was Appleton's mother. Severe! Save us," exclaimed Mrs. Reed, "but she was stiff as starched crepe. His father was minister to France. The Brices were in the India trade, and they had money enough to buy the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... get out. In the outer room the two women knitted black wool feverishly. People were arriving, and the younger one was walking back and forth introducing them. The old one sat on her chair. Her flat cloth slippers were propped up on a foot-warmer, and a cat reposed on her lap. She wore a starched white affair on her head, had a wart on one cheek, and silver-rimmed spectacles hung on the tip of her nose. She glanced at me above the glasses. The swift and indifferent placidity of that look troubled me. Two youths with foolish and cheery countenances were being piloted over, and ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... deformed from pushing the plough which makes the left shoulder higher, and bends their figures sideways; from reaping the grain, when they have to spread their legs so as to keep on their feet. Their starched blue blouses, glossy as though varnished, ornamented at collar and cuffs with a little embroidered design and blown out around their bony bodies, looked very much like balloons about to soar, whence issued ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... her door, gazing drearily down the long, empty corridor in which the breakfast gong echoed mournfully. All the usual brisk scenes of that hour, groups of girls in Peter Thomson suits or starched shirt-waists, or a pair of energetic ones, red-cheeked and shining-eyed from a run in the snow, had vanished as by the hand of some evil magician. Silent and ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... starched rustling on the stairs betokened the descent of Mandy Calline. Pushing back the door, she stepped down with all the dignity which she deemed suitable to don ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... face, a large mouth, the upper lip darkened by a suggestion of moustache, and little round blue eyes, hard and restless with a continual fuming irritation. She is got up regardless in her ridiculous Sunday-best. Mary appears tall and skinny-legged in a starched, outgrown frock. The sweetness of her face has disappeared, giving way to a hang-dog sullenness, a stubborn silence, with sulky, furtive glances of rebellion ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... observers. Applause long and hearty rewarded his efforts, and also brought Maggie to the rescue. As she pounced upon him and knocked the sputtering candle to the ground, Peter and Perdita, splendid in starched white linen, appeared in the doorway behind "the party" and invited every one to come ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... he had always despised Charlie, and that no worldly advantage whatever would accrue to him by a marriage with such a girl. But there she was, and he didn't quite know how to avoid it. She did look rather nice in her clear-starched muslin frock, and he felt that he should like to kiss her. He needn't marry her because he kissed her. The champagne which had created the desire also gave him the audacity. He gave one glance around him to see that he was not observed, and then he did kiss Charlie Fairstairs under the ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... reap'd most substantiall, like a brush, Which makes a Nat'rall wit knowne by the bush: (And in my time of some men I have heard, Whose wisedome have bin onely wealth and beard) Many of these the proverbe well doth fit, Which sayes Bush naturall, More haire then wit. Some seeme as they were starched stiffe and fine, Like to the bristles of some angry swine: And some (to set their Loves desire on edge) Are cut and prun'de like to a quickset hedge. Some like a spade, some like a forke, some square, Some round, some mow'd like stubble, some starke bare, Some sharpe Steletto fashion, dagger like, ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... smoothed down comfortably into his eyes, Mrs Prig and Mrs Gamp put on his neckerchief; adjusting his shirt collar with great nicety, so that the starched points should also invade those organs, and afflict them with an artificial ophthalmia. His waistcoat and coat were next arranged; and as every button was wrenched into a wrong button-hole, and the order of his boots was reversed, he presented on ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... "You wears buckskins an' flannels an' a frontier hat; you goes about with your shirt-sleeves rolled up an' a scarf 'stead of a stiff starched collar; but you takes care that thar's allus elegant underclothin' nex' yer skin. You've gotten surprisin' clean habits, too: washes yourself three or four times a day, allus shaves yerself mornin's an' oils an' brushes yer hair. You don't go ter bed wi' yer boots and breeches ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... and carved in grim festoons and ovals of incessant repetition,—its penitential couch of a sofa, where only the iron spine of a Revolutionary heroine could have found rest,—its pinched, starved, and double-starched portraits of defunct Hydes, Puritanic to the very ends of toupet and periwig,—little Mrs. Hyde was deep enough in love with her tall and handsome husband to overlook the upholstery of a home he glorified, and to care little for comfort elsewhere, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... eyes lifted across the valley until a sudden fragrance drew her attention earthwards. She was going through an open glade of aspens and the ground was white with columbine, enormous flowers snowy and crisp as though freshly starched by fairy laundresses. With a cry of delight Sheila jumped off her horse, tied him by his reins to a tree, and began gathering flowers with all the eager concentration of a six-year-old. And, like all the flower-gatherers of fable from Proserpina down, she found ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... print shirt covered with blue dogs; and as the lower portion of this latter garment was hanging outside instead of being tucked inside his moleskins, quite a large number of dogs were visible. Hans, dressed in pyjamas of a green and yellow check, carefully starched, smoked a very bad German cigar; Deasy puffed ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... were always dressed alike in elaborately simple clothes, with frilly, starched underpinnies, silk stockings, high boots buttoned up slim legs; and across their shoulders, from beneath wonderful lingerie hats, hung shining curls. The latter were not natural, but had each day to be elaborately constructed. They made a dainty and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... taking down her own starched, blue house dress from the line. It was hung like a pirate in chains by its sleeves, was blown out as round as a barrel, and was as stiff as a board. Just as the pins came out an extra heavy puff of wind shrieked around the corner of the ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... gets out her miniature thimble and scissors, and falls to work upon a pair of slippers she was embroidering for her father's birthday present, sitting up, starched and prim as an old maid, her lips pursed, and her forehead gravely consequential. I could not close my eyes without seeing her still, like an undersized nightmare, her hair smooth to the least hair, her dress neat to the smallest fold, stitching, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... garments, kick themselves about like some staid old deacon having his fling. Then there is the middle-sized bear whose bloomers, billowed by the wind, become a ridiculous fat woman cut off at the waist. And the little bear's starched clothes crack and snap while the revolving tree-horse whirls about like some mad dervish. I often wonder if the family know of the wild actions that ...
— Vignettes of San Francisco • Almira Bailey
... morning. She wore absurd pale-blue negligees that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The neighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said it was disgusting—and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome. Blanche Devine—snipping her sweet peas, peering anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... a presentiment that he should meet his neighbor under the wistaria arbor grew stronger and stronger, until, as he turned into the broad, southeastern entrance to the Park, his heart began beating an uneasy, expectant tattoo under his starched white waist-coat. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... gang of city spoilers hadn't arrived with the railway. They would have been a relief. There was the monotonous aldermanic row, and the worse than hopeless little herd of aldermen, the weird agricultural portion of whom came in on council days in white starched and ironed coats, as we had always remembered them. They were aggressively barren of ideas; but on this occasion they had risen above themselves, for one of them had remembered something his grandfather (old time English alderman) had told him, and they were stirring up all the old local quarrels ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... peasant-lads who had crammed themselves through their Intermediate at a spurt, and now wore the College cap above their rough grey homespun, and dreamed of getting through in no time, and turning into great men with starched cuffs and pince-nez. There were pale young enthusiasts, too, who would probably end as actors; and there were also quondam actors, killed by the critics, but still sufficiently alive, it seemed, "to be engineers." And as the young fellows hurried ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... frocks. The calico made another frock and two nice pinafores, the black alpaca some small aprons. Mary trimmed the two worst hats with the ribbon. Last of all, she cut and stitched five narrow bands of the linen, which mother washed and starched, and behold, the class had collars! I don't know which was most pleased at this last decoration, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... their big Territories, and came to what they are in the world, will be seen. Probably they were not, any of them, paragons of virtue. They did not walk in altogether speckless Sunday pumps, or much clear-starched into consciousness of the moral sublime; but in rugged practical boots, and by such roads as there were. Concerning their moralities, and conformities to the Laws of the Road and of the Universe, there will much remain to be argued by pamphleteers ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... don't; and you may have to do more disagreeable things than that yet. I am going away for a rest as soon as the woman comes and gets used to the house, and she will not be able to see after everything without some help. Those starched clothes that you put into the wash every week with so little thought of the extra work they make—she will not be able to do them, if she has to see about everything else. There is a whole basketful there now, waiting ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... Heid had just been feeding his cows. In his shirt-sleeves he came from the stable, still wearing the gay-colored cravat and the starched collar that he had put on to go to the tavern. "Well, what do you want?" The tone of his question ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... his satisfaction, he selected from the stock of old civilian clothing a respectable riding-suit of English whip-cord, inspected it carefully for spots, and, finding none, donned it. A clean starched chambray shirt, set off by a black-silk Windsor tie, completed his attire, with the exception of a soft, wide, flat-brimmed gray-beaver hat, and stamped him as that which he had once been but was no longer—a California rancher of taste and means ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... ill. The herb tea did not cure him, nor did the stuff the doctor gave him. Nor did the starched crackling nurse, who turned Joanna out of the room and exasperatingly spoke ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... was medicine for the soul—a number of pretty little books in middle-age bindings, in antique type many of theist, adorned with pictures of the German school, representing demure ecclesiastics, with their heads on one side, children in long starched nightgowns, virgins bearing lilies, and so forth, from which it was to be concluded that the owner of the volumes was not so hostile to Rome as she had been at an earlier period of her religious life; and that she had ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to foot, and though conscious of appearing rather plain and quaker-like, we can assure our friends that in this, we conform to the newest fashion, and have no doubt of being treated civilly by as large a portion of the public, as if we had appeared with more gay feathers in our cap, with starched ruffles and gilt buttons and trimmings. In this, however, we would not be understood to boast, of any peculiar evidence of taste of our own, as we have been induced in this instance, to submit wholly to that ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... perceived a long, double row of clean white-painted iron beds, on which lay or sat figures of men. Other figures, of women, glided here and there noiselessly. They wore long, spreading dove-gray clothes, with a starched white kerchief drawn over the shoulders and across the breast. Their heads were quaintly white-garbed in stiff winglike coifs, fitting close about the oval of the face. Then Thorpe sighed comfortably, and closed his eyes and blessed the chance that he had bought a hospital ticket of the agent who ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... Bogle's was a young man named Seeders, who worked in a laundry office. Mr. Seeders was thin and had light hair, and appeared to have been recently rough-dried and starched. He was too diffident to aspire to Aileen's notice; so he usually sat at one of Tildy's tables, where he devoted himself to silence ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... but the fact was better than their fears. My lord, after leaving Bath, had had a fresh attack of the gout; and when he would be able to proceed on his journey only Dr. Addington, his physician, whose gold-headed cane, great wig, and starched aspect did not foster curiosity, could pretend to say. Perhaps Mr. Smith, the landlord, was as much concerned as any; when he learned the state of the case, he fell to mental arithmetic with the assistance of his fingers, and at times looked blank. Counting up the earl and his gentleman, ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... to take up such a hobby. The German Professor, as usual. Ah, Mr. Koken, Mr. Koken—those light words of yours have borne a heavy fruit. I possess four hundred implements now, and they will double the weight of my luggage and ruin my starched shirts, especially those formidable "praechellean" skull-cleavers. And I know exactly what the customs officer at Marseilles will say, when ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... narrow bed, one of many, ranged on both sides down the hospital walls. Large windows, set very high up, opened on to grey skies and a flood of rather cold sunshine. At the foot of her bed, watching her with impartial eyes, stood a man, and beside him two nurses, their neat pink dresses and starched aprons rustling a little ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... dresses and an extraordinary amount of stiffly starched aprons and caps and streamers rose awkwardly and bobbed awkward little bows. One was very tall, the other rather short. The tall one looked extraordinarily severe and the short one extraordinarily glum, Mark thought, to have young men. Mabel looked from the girls ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... the General were taking the morning air. Caroline walked ahead, her chin well up, her nose sniffing pleasurably the unaccustomed asphalt, the fresh damp of the river, and the watered bridle path. The starched ties at the back of her white pinafore fairly took the breeze, as she swung along to the thrilling clangor of the monster hurdy-gurdy. Miss Honey, urban and blase, balanced herself with dignity upon her long, boat-shaped roller-skates, and watched with patronizing interest the mysterious jumping ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... were, still bearing tribute to the glories of the past. There were monuments, too, in memory of the Courtenays: stone effigies of knights in armour, lying under carved canopies emblazoned with their coats-of-arms; stiff ladies and gentlemen of Tudor times, with starched ruffs and buckled shoes; and one lovely marble figure, by a forgotten sculptor, of a young daughter of the house who had perished during the Great Plague. The ruthless hands that had chipped and spoiled many ...
— The Manor House School • Angela Brazil
... softest tone, "do you know you have never called to take away the shirts you left for me to make more than two years ago? I have often thought I would take them to you; but sister Stanhope said I had better wait, as you would call when you wanted them. I starched and ironed them all up nice for you; but I am sure the stiffening is all out, and they are as yellow as saffron ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... in the girl in her stiffly starched uniform before the match burned out and darkness ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... girdle with quite a Henry V air. Jeff looked more like—well, like a Huguenot Lover; and I don't know what I looked like, only that I felt very comfortable. When I got back to our own padded armor and its starched borders I realized with acute regret how comfortable were ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... her. The small boulder upon which she had placed the box was round, and it was difficult to maintain one's position upon it without slipping. Doubly difficult if one were perched upon a sharp-angled cube, and one's pique skirt was stiffly starched. He comprehended the situation and meant to be upon the spot when the slipping occurred. He really didn't care very much to know what she was hiding, but was grateful for ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... falls thickly behind upon their necks in a multitude of little curls, which must have taken them no small trouble to get into order. Most wear nothing but a kilt of white linen; but the chief officer has a fine white cloak thrown over his shoulders; his linen kilt is stiffly starched, so that it stands out almost like a board where it folds over in front, and he wears a gilded girdle with fringed ends which hang down nearly to his knees. In his right hand he carries a long stick, which he ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Egypt • James Baikie
... unaccustomed to. The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein makes love to a private soldier simply because she don't know what a private soldier is. This girl must have lived amongst a set of starched and stuck-up people who have not two ideas beyond themselves and their order. She has never so much as seen a smart, business-like, active fellow, ready to take all trouble off her hands, and make ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... President des Brosses," 65, 69, 70, 346.—"Lettres du President des Brosses," (ed. Coulomb), passim.—Piron being uneasy concerning his "Ode a Priape," President Bouhier, a man of great and fine erudition, and the least starched of learned ones, sent for the young man and said to him, "You are a foolish fellow. If any one presses you to know the author of the offence tell him that I am." (Sainte-Beuve, "Nouveaux ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... dozen solemn personages with gold-braided hats and long red robes bordered with ermine, and wearing starched ruffles, occupied one corner of the parlor near the windows. These worthy advisers of the Dukes of Lorraine explained the way in which the masters of the chateau had awakened from the torpor in which they had been plunged ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... squeezed through the doorway with much crackling of unseen starched flounces, but Gerrard had no time to analyse the effect upon himself of the news he had received. Sir Arthur Cinnamond was his next visitor, confirming the news of Colonel Antony's knighthood, and then came Captain Cowper to tell his chief that the acting-Resident was asking ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... he sat, rather stiff and brittle in the old Withams' pew, his head pressed a little back, so that his face and neck seemed slightly flattened. He wore very low, turn-down starched collars that showed all his neck. And he kept looking up at her during the service—she sat in the choir-loft—gazing up at her with apparently love-lorn eyes and a faint, intimate smile—the sort of ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... was dressing in another room, and I heard some one bring him his blue frockcoat and under-linen. Then at the door leading downstairs I heard a maid-servant's voice, and went to see what she wanted. In her hand she held a well-starched shirt which she said she had been sitting up all night to get ready. I took it, and asked ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... weather, go on foot from one house to another in the same neighbourhood, but when she had to proceed to another district, would make use of a transfer-ticket on the omnibus. For the first minute or two, until the natural courtesy of the woman broke through the starched surface of the doctor's-wife, not being certain, either, whether she ought to mention the Verdurins before Swann, she produced, quite naturally, in her slow and awkward, but not unattractive voice, which, every now and then, was completely drowned by the rattling of the omnibus, topics selected ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... that Mrs. Bardell being engaged to Pickwick was the current topic of conversation in the neighbourhood, after the fainting in July; had been told it herself by Mrs. Mudberry which kept a mangle, and Mrs. Bunkin which clear-starched, but did not see either Mrs. Mudberry or ...
— Bardell v. Pickwick • Percy Fitzgerald
... the end of half-an-hour his patience abandoned him. He deliberately reached out and threw everything upon the floor. The Sister came running up to see what was the matter. He maintained a haughty silence. She picked up the aluminium plates and cups. Her starched dress crinkled. ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... ever permitted to see her in disarray, but always, as it seemed to me, fresh from my sister's clever hands, her hair laid smooth and shining, her simple gown starched crisp and sweetly smelling of the ironing board; and when I asked her why she was never but thus lovely, she answered, with a smile, that surely it pleased her son to find her always so: which, indeed, it did. I felt, hence, ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... assumed all its different shapes before him, tried all its masks, except that of religious integrity. So that he refused in his own mind to believe in the venality of a man who lived in such surroundings. Ushered into the advocate's waiting-room, a large parlor with curtains of starched muslin as fine as that of which surplices are made, its only ornament a large and beautiful copy of Tintoret's Dead Christ over the door, his uncertainty and anxiety changed to indignant conviction. It was not possible. He had been misled touching ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... thick brows that arched and met. His manner was courteous and dignified. He was dressed in light gray trowsers of perfect cut, patent-leather boots and a red-and-black spotted shirt, which displayed in its front a set of superb diamond studs. From under a Byron collar, parfaitement starched, peeped the ends of a pale lilac scarf. A magnificent seal-ring decorated the third finger of his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... Shakespeare's characters. It is as if they had been veritable living men and women, and he had seen and comprehended and delivered the whole and pure truth respecting them. Of course, therefore, they are as far as possible from being mere names set before pieces of starched and painted rhetoric, or mere got-up figures of modes and manners: they are no shadows or images of fancy, no heroes of romance, no theatrical personages at all; they have nothing surreptitious or make-believe or ungenuine about them: they do not in any sort ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the purpose, and returned with a plate, a napkin (the latter starched to the consistency of dried bark), a knife with a bone handle beginning to turn yellow, a two-pronged fork as thin as a wafer, and a salt-cellar incapable of being made to ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... in her sweetest tone, "forgive me, cousin. I feel as if I must break out a bit, now and then. Yankee manners, you know. Let me stay quiet with you for a while. You know the thought of starched and stiff London society quite frightens me. I am not used to anything stiff. Let me stay at ...
— In Luck at Last • Walter Besant
... He has always been an obstinate melancholic lunatic, confined to his chamber by day, and wandering like a ghost by night, refusing all admission. Moreover my good Aylward had appeared hitherto a paragon of a duenna for discretion, only over starched in her precision. Little did I expect to find my young lady spending all her evenings alone with him, and the solitary hermit transformed into a gay and gallant bachelor like the Friar of Orders Gray in the song. And since matters have gone to such a ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Voronok at home. He did not much resemble a party workman; he was gracious, spoke little, and produced the impression of a reserved, well-trained man. He always wore starched linen, a high collar, a fashionable tie and a bowler hat. He had his hair trimmed short, and his ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... along—a brow big and full of cause and effect and of quiet deductions and deliberate conclusions. His coat was seedy, his trousers bagged at the knees, his shoes were old, and there were patches on them, but his collar and linen were white and very much starched, and his awkward, shambling gait was honest to the last footfall. A world of depth and soul was in his strong, fine face, lit up now with an honest, humble smile, but, at rest, full ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore |
