"Slenderness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in a clear lake, was struck with the beauty of his horns, which he saw reflected in the water. At the same time, observing the extreme length and slenderness of his legs, 'What a pity it is,' said he, 'that so fine a creature should be furnished with so despicable a set of spindle-shanks! What a noble animal I should be, were my legs answerable ...
— Stories about Animals: with Pictures to Match • Francis C. Woodworth
... revealed as a grotesque parody of that of a human being, with arms and legs like pipe-stems, a bald oval head that merged with neckless rigidity directly into a heavy-shouldered body that tapered into an almost wasp-like slenderness at the waist. He was naked save for a loin cloth of some metallic fabric. His bluish-gray skin had a dull oily sheen strangely suggestive of fine ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... from the top of her black head to the tips of her brown shoes. He could have counted the freckles bridging her nose. The sunburn on her cheeks was very visible; there was something arresting in the depth of her eyes, the curve of her lips, the lithe slenderness of her young body; she gave the effect of something smoldering inside that would leap at ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... of her supple slenderness there was strength in her small wrists. She fought and twisted till she was worn out in her efforts to free herself. Panting, ...
— Crooked Trails and Straight • William MacLeod Raine
... darkness of the passage between the house and the wings. A short flight of damp steps surmounted, one of the strangest of all spectacles opened out before the provincial poet's eyes. The height of the roof, the slenderness of the props, the ladders hung with Argand lamps, the atrocious ugliness of scenery beheld at close quarters, the thick paint on the actors' faces, and their outlandish costumes, made of such coarse ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the obstinate flush a trifle deeper on his forehead, his huge muscles bulging under the black cloth of his coat, carefully looked the poet up and down as though measuring the strength of his slenderness. ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... of her hair in the sunshine, the glint of its gold by the firelight, and the waywardness of it and the glory. He liked her neat-shod feet and the gray-gaitered calves,—alas, now hidden in long-skirted Dawson. He liked her for the strength of her slenderness; and to walk with her, swinging her step and stride to his, or to merely watch her come across a room or down the street, was a delight. Life and the joy of life romped through her blood, abstemiously filling out and rounding off each shapely muscle and soft curve. And he liked it all. Especially ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... How is the Jap, knowing it is now or never with him—and cognizant that he is poor in all save ambition and enterprise—going to create for his beloved Nippon a position of prominence and security in the fast-rushing, selfish world? Every intelligent Japanese is aware of the slenderness of his country's resources, and yet every son of the Chrysanthemum Realm throbs with desire to see Japan a first-class and self-supporting power, honored and respected ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... craft."—Johnson. "A chilness, or shivering of the body, generally precedes a fever."—Murray's Key, p. 167. "Smalness; littleness, minuteness, weakness."—Rhyming Dict. "Gall-less, a. free from gall or bitterness."—Webster's Dict. "Talness; height of stature, upright length with comparative slenderness."—See Johnson et al. "Wilful; stubborn, contumacious, perverse, inflexible."—Id. "He guided them by the skilfulness of his hands."—Psal. lxxviii, 72. "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof."—Murray's Key, p. 172. "What is now, is but an ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... they done to me?" replied Madame. "One must be a woman to understand it, sire—they have made me shed tears;" and, with one of her fingers, whose slenderness and perfect whiteness were unequaled, she pointed to her brilliant eyes swimming with unshed drops, and again ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... three-quarters of an hour later, when he had dressed and turned again to the stairway, she was there at the foot of the flight, waiting for him to appear. In a little low pink satin gown that made rounded her slenderness—made her appear even smaller than she was—she gave him an elaborate courtesy from the main floor, and flung up at ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... body, large and massive, achieved the grace of slenderness from the sheer perfection of its lines. Her attire, within the bounds of its subservience to Paris, was certainly unique. It was wonderful the amount of decoration she could carry without being the worse for it. Her head alone, over and above its bronze hair, coil on coil and ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... reminding us that decay has begun, a black speck on a tooth cannot fail to do so; and when we go to the dentist to have it stopped we have begun to repair artificially the falling structure. The activity of youth soon passes, and its slenderness. I remember still the shock I felt on hearing an athlete say that he could no longer run races of a hundred yards; he was half a second or a quarter of a second slower than he was last year. I looked at him saying, "But you are only one-and-twenty," and he answered, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... her, the more she enchanted me. She was exquisitely beautiful. Her slenderness was a charm. ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... extended to impalpabilities. His dense, delicate hair, his overdrawn, retouched features, his clear complexion, ripe without being coarse, the very evenness of the growth of his beard, and that light, smooth slenderness of structure which made the movement of a single one of his fingers produce the effect of an expressive gesture—these personal points struck our sensitive young woman as signs of quality, of intensity, somehow as promises of interest. He was certainly fastidious and critical; he ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... things as premonitions. At any rate he had an altogether disproportionate sense of the significance of the afternoon's adventure,—which after all was a very small adventure indeed. A mere talk. His mind refused to leave her, her black furry slenderness, her dark trustful eyes, the sweet firmness of her perfect lips, her appealing simplicity that was yet somehow compatible with the completest self-possession. He went over the incident of the board again and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... and it was probably the same that was sold among the books of Topham Beauclerc in 1781. It is spoken of in "The French Academy" [1589] as having "lately passed the press;" but Lodge himself, in his "Alarum against Usurers," very clearly accounts for its extreme rarity: he says, "by reason of the slenderness of the subject (because it was in defence of plaies and play-makers) the godly and reverent that had to deal in the cause, misliking it, forbad the publishing;" and he charges Gosson with "comming by a private unperfect coppye," on which he framed his answer, entitled, "Plays ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... sun, &c. I knew a boy who, upon observing steadily, and reflecting upon a phenomenon that met him in his daily experience, viz., that tubes, through which a stream of water was passing, gave out a very different sound according to the varying slenderness or fulness of the current, devised an instrument that yielded a rude hydraulic gamut of sounds; and, indeed, upon this simple phenomenon is founded the use and power of the stethoscope. For exactly as a thin thread of water, trickling through a leaden ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... them, without a shore, spreads open sea. But the fantastic grandeur of the place cannot be described in words. The pencil of the artist must be trusted. I can vouch that he has not in the least exaggerated the slenderness and steepness of the rock-masses. One of them, it is said, has never been climbed; unless a myth which hangs about it is true. Certain English sailors, probably of Rodney's men—and numbering, according to the pleasure ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... ten years, and the other was stationed for some time at Newport, R.I., in a healthy locality, noted in those days for the beauty of its women. Yet we find it their verdict upon these grandmothers of nearly a hundred years ago, that they showed the same delicate beauty, the same slenderness, the same pallor, the same fragility, the same early decline, with which their granddaughters ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... income was implied by the possession of country-seats such as are not in America a concomitant of even the largest fortunes; and if in these interrogations I sometimes heard of a very long rent-roll, on the other hand I was frequently surprised at the slenderness of the resources attributed to people living in the depths of an oak-studded park. Then, certainly, English country life seemed to me the most advantageous thing in the world: on these terms one would gladly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... machine, I see him clearly: his brown, curling hair; his eyes blue as the sea; his chest both arched and so plump, his rounded arms, his taper waist, the graceful swell of his hips and full, snowy thighs; I recall as of yesterday the dimples in his knees, the slenderness of his ankles, the softness of his little feet, with insteps pink like the inside of a shell. How I gloated over his ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... roundness of the moon, the undulations of the serpent, the entwinement of clinging plants, the trembling of the grass, the slenderness of the rose-vine and the velvet of the flower, the lightness of the leaf and the glance of the fawn, the gaiety of the sun's rays and tears of the mist, the inconstancy of the wind and the timidity of the hare, the vanity of the peacock and the softness of the down on the throat of the swallow, the ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... Lotus looked on in mute and helpless rage. All were covered by the guns of the boarding party—the still forms of two of their companions bearing eloquent witness to the slenderness of provocation necessary to tighten the trigger fingers of the ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... often noticeable for their knotted knuckles and club-shaped finger-tips; suicides—for the slenderness of the thumbs and strong inclination of the index to the second finger; thieves—for the pointedness of the finger-tips, and the length and suppleness of the fingers. Dominating, coarse-minded people, and people who exert undue influence ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... harmlessly, into a pine wood. Among other experiments, he makes a small copy of Mr. Cocking's parachute, and drops it to earth with a cat as passenger, proving thereby that that unfortunate gentleman's principle was really less in fault than the actual slenderness of the material used ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... gestures, and that authentic hair of hers falling in Victorian curls, she offered to the world a figure that no one could regard without a physical pleasure and stimulation. And she was so shiningly correct in her black silk and black velvet, and in the massive jet at her throat, and in the slenderness of her shoe! It was useless to recall her duplicities, her mendacities, her hypocrisies, her meannesses. At any rate she could be generous at moments, and the splendour of her vitality sometimes, as now, hid all her faults. She would confess to aches ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Mademoiselle de Sevigne, whom her fond mother called the "prettiest girl in France," and Mademoiselle de La Valliere, who, despite her slight lameness, danced to perfection, her slim figure, of the lissome slenderness that belongs to early youth, showing to great advantage in the figures of ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... unseasonable hours, sits up late at night, attends fashionable parties and indulges in the usual means of dissipation there afforded, dancing, wine, rich suppers, etc., who carefully follows the fashions in her dress, lacing her waist to attain the fashionable degree of slenderness, wearing thin, narrow-toed gaiters with French heels, and insufficiently clothing the limbs in cold weather, and who in like manner neglects to comply with the requirements of health in other important particulars, may be certain that sooner or later, certainly at no distant day, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... Her sweet slenderness barred the way about as electively as a mother quail does the road to her young. He smiled, put his big hands on her elbows, and gently lifted her to one side. Then he strode forward lightly, with the long, easy, tireless stride of a beast of prey, ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... Congregational church at Portsmouth then. One Sunday morning in 1808, his eldest daughter sitting alone in the minister's pew, a strange gentleman was shown into it, whose appearance and demeanor strongly arrested her attention. The slenderness of his frame, the pale yellow of his complexion, and the raven blackness of his hair, seemed only to bring out into grander relief his ample forehead, and to heighten the effect of his deep-set, brilliant eyes. At this period of his life there was an air of delicacy and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... the misty veil, drawn in and daintily knotted beneath her chin, which lent her head and face such thorough protection against prying glances; of grey suede were the light gauntlets that hid all save the slenderness of her small hands; and the wrap that, cut upon full and flowing lines, cloaked her figure beyond suggestion, was grey. Yet even its ample drapery could not dissemble the fact that she was quite small, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... kicked off with the second boot, and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colour of life. You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still shouts with a Cockney accent. You half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, his brightness, and his glow. Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun, he gives his colours to ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... his lair, while Joe and the remainder of the company were despatched to the passes among the hills. There was a narrow-featured Vermonter in this party, termed, by his comrades, the Hatchet-face, and, in truth, the extreme thinness of his chest and the slenderness of his limbs might as aptly have been called the hatchet-handle. But, so far from being unfit for the hardy pursuits of a hunter, he was gifted with the activity of a greyhound, and the swiftness and bottom of a race-horse. His name was Sneak Punk, which was always abbreviated to merely Sneak, ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... no need to be. Her call to him had been the saner call of mind to mind. That he desired, besides, the passing benediction of her hands, the fragrance of her corn-gold hair, the sight of her slenderness: this she had guessed and gloried in. Till now, he had touched her physical self neither in word nor deed. To-night, she knew, the barriers would be down; ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... her shoulders and looked at her, at the long brilliant face beneath the beaver cap, at the fine steel slenderness of her, and then he said in ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... never more decisively set under her mannish hat, her waist never more attractively outlined in slenderness, she silently faced de Spain in the morning gray. His face reflected his chagrined perplexity. The whole fabric of his slender plot seemed to go to pieces at the sight of her. At the mere appearance of his frail and motionless foe a feeling of awkward helplessness dissolved ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... under the thick dark hair. Strength herself had moulded the exquisite chin. And a rogue of a dimple was there to mock the lot of them—the print of the delicate finger of Laughter herself, set in a baby's cheek twenty-five years before. A tiny watch upon a silk strap served to enhance the slenderness of a white wrist. Against the dark cloud of hair, which they were setting straight, the pointed fingers stood out like living statuary. Lifted elbows gave you the graceful line of her figure: the short skirt, ankles to match ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... fellowship, and Dick having relieved him of his encumbrances, he retreated behind the shelter of Mrs. Peyton's welcome. The latter judiciously gave him time to recover, and when she turned to him he was engaged in a surreptitious inspection of Miss Verney, whose dusky slenderness, relieved against the bare walls of the office, made her look like a young St. John of Donatello's. The girl returned his look with one of her clear glances, and the group having presently broken up again, Mrs. Peyton saw that she had drifted to ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... generally more prolific than the average of the squire's estate. Much may be made of slender gifts, small resources, and limited opportunities if carefully cultivated, as they should be, and as their very slenderness should stimulate their being. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and took on gradually something of the supernatural—her tall, straight slenderness, her steady eyes, her halo of red hair grew to have a sort of sacred significance, like that ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... feet four inches in height. He had the rider's wiry slenderness, yet he was broad of shoulder. His arms were long. Manifestly he was an exceedingly powerful man. He swung the driver aloft and whirled it down with a tremendous swing. Crack! The white ball disappeared, and from where it had been rose a tiny cloud ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... morning when Maria, in her little black frock—it was made of a thin lawn for the hot days, and the pale slenderness of her arms and neck were revealed by the thinness of the fabric—went to school, she knew, the very moment that Miss Ida Slome greeted her, that Aunt Maria had been right in her surmise. For the first time since ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... effectually advertise their sweets on whose removal by an insect benefactor that will carry pollen from flower to flower as he feeds depends their chance of producing fertile seed. It is probable the flower is white that night-flying moths may see it shine in the gloaming. From the length and slenderness of its spur it is doubtless ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... look at the prisoner drained my laughter. He was lying on a bench, his face hidden in his out-flung arms, and his slenderness and helplessness pulled at me hard. I knew that despair, and even tears, must have conquered now that he was alone, and I wished that I might save his pride, and slip away until he had fought back his bravery, and had himself ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... no denying that hers were both becoming and "decent." Modeled after the usual riding costume, both coat and breeches were youthfully, rather than mannishly, tailored; and the narrow, vertical stripe of the dark gray material served to make her slenderness almost girlish. In short, what with her poet-style hair, her independent manner and direct speech, she was far more like a boy of twenty ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... of a series of perpendicular bands alternately flat and concave, exactly similar to the flutes of the Ionic order. The summit is crowned by a plume of palm leaves rising from a double scroll, like two consoles placed horizontally and head to head. The grace and slenderness of this stele are in strong contrast to the usually short and heavy forms affected by the Assyrian architects, especially when they worked in stone. It is difficult to say what its destination may have been. It was discovered ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... The wearer must always be considered. Short, stout women should avoid horizontal stripes or lines of ornamentation that call attention to breadth, and should choose those perpendicular stripes and lines which tend to give an impression of height and slenderness. A hat lining may be used to put rosiness into a pale face, and a color may be selected for a dress which will neutralize too much redness in the skin. But these are matters of common knowledge to all women. The trouble is, that in their desire to be "in style," many women forget, ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... their seeds beneath their tough rind. Yet the enjoyment of it is but short-lived; for the same winds[66] which give it a name, beat it down, as it has but a slender hold, and is apt to fall by reason of its extreme slenderness." ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... there exist, the same delicacy of proportion, the same effeminacy of person, the same slenderness of hand and foot, which characterise the female of refined society; in despite too of the fact, that every laborious duty and every species of drudgery, are imposed on them from childhood. Their faces are broad, and between the eyes they are ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... closeness as we exchanged the commonplaces. I understood, when I saw her, how it was that he had referred to her so absurdly as a little brown streak of a thing. Little she was, assuredly, and brown, and so slender, that his simile was not bad, but the brownness and the slenderness were by no means all there was noticeable of her. She was not imposing, this woman, but she was not commonplace. Supple of figure she was, and there were the big eyes this stricken friend of mine had told ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... was that he told me thus: That by night and moon he came on one riding the highway, just about where the other woman had been seen, whose tale he had heard of. He deemed at first this rider to be a man, or a lad rather for smallness and slenderness, but coming close up he found it was a woman, and saw on her neck a chaplet of gems, and deemed it no great feat to take it of her: but he asked her of whence and ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... doubt from the brickyard outside the North Gate owned by the founder of the family fortunes. The pillars and capitals of the arcades of both the nave and chancel are thin and unsatisfying to the eye, and the interior as a whole, although spacious, does not convey any pleasing sensations. The slenderness of the columns was necessary, it appears, owing to the soft and insecure ground, which necessitated a pile foundation and as light a weight above as could ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... and swept back into the room, looking a charming figure of sylph-like slenderness and elegance in her clinging gown of soft white satin showered ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... himself in all his slenderness, rocked, staggered, and caught Ricardo's shoulder. His henchman assisted him to the pipe, which went on gushing a clear stream of water, sparkling exceedingly against the black piles and the gloom ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... difficult for the non-carnivorous, and generally upset the ordered balance of things which made life worth living for the wild people of that range. It was as disturbing to them, and more lastingly so, by reason of the comparative slenderness of their resources, as the passage through a town of an armed giant, who was also a thief and a murderer, would be to humans. Finn had been feared and respected in that corner of the Tinnaburra; ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... man of our time need some such friendly warning? Let us first get a hint from what foreigners think of us ultra-modernized Americans. Wandering journalists, of an ethnological turn of mind, who visit these shores, profess to be struck with the slenderness, the apparent lack of toughness, the dyspeptic look, of the American physique. And from such observations it has been seriously argued that the stalwart English race is suffering inevitable degeneracy in this foreign climate. I have even seen it doubted ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... taller on the ground than in the saddle and an admirable breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist told eloquently of strength. He could not have been over twenty-five or six. Yet certain hard lines about his mouth, the glint of mockery in his eyes, the pronounced forward thrust of the chin, the indefinable force that seemed to radiate from him, told the ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... diminution in the thickness of the independent pier; in the last, it is an apparent diminution, obtained by giving it the appearance of a group of minor piers. The distinction, however, with which we are concerned is not that of slenderness, but of vertical or curved contour; and we may note generally that while throughout the whole range of Northern work, the perpendicular shaft appears in continually clearer development, throughout every group which has inherited the spirit of the Greek, the ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the painting of the face and sides served two purposes; one to render it easier for the animal to find favour in the eyes of the gods, the other to bring about the same result in the eyes of man; even as does woman when she accentuates the night blackness of her eyes with antimony; and the slenderness of her finger-tips ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... her, for she had got to her feet, and he had risen with her. One hundred and twenty pounds of girlish grace and slenderness looked even less beside one hundred and eighty of well-distributed masculine bulk. But it was only his lips which laughed. His eyes dwelt on her with no raillery in their depths, only a longing which grew with each jesting word ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... (12 in.), their length being 120 in. These columns contained nine longitudinal rods, 5/8 in. in diameter, and 1/4-in. steel rings every foot. They stood an ultimate load averaging 2,438 lb. per sq. in. This is less than the column with no steel and with practically the same ratio of slenderness. ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... plainest, while their reign endures. A boy in any other climate, in this his nineteen years had given him the stature of a man; and Spain, the land of romance, seemed embodied in this figure, full of the lithe slenderness of the whispering palms overhead, the warm coloring of the deep-toned flowers sleeping in the room, the native grace of the tame antelope lifting its human eyes to his as he lingered on the threshold in an attitude eager ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... three sharp steps toward her and stood looking down in her face, her sweet slenderness so close to him that the perfume mounted to his brain. Surely no maiden had ever been more desirable than this one, who held him in such contemptuous estimation that only her steady eyes moved at his approach. These held to his and defied him, while she stood leaning motionless ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... bred, she was active as a bighorn. Her slenderness was deceptive. It concealed the pack of her long rippling muscles, the deep-breasted strength of her torso. One might have marched a long day's journey without finding a young woman more perfectly modeled for grace and ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... it is not at all likely that he would ever find himself a misfit were it not for the fact that many men are lean and slender or muscular and robust up to the age of 30 or 40, and after that put on flesh rapidly. These men, therefore, are often deceived in regard to themselves. In the slenderness of youth, they feel active and are active. In short, they have the qualities, in these early periods of their life, which we should expect in men of similar build. They are, therefore, too likely to enter upon vocations for which they will find themselves unfitted as the years go by and they put ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... themselves during an appreciable moment. It is a pity that the English violet should grow into such an outrageously developed peony as I have attempted to describe. I wonder whether a middle-aged husband ought to be considered as legally married to all the accretions that have overgrown the slenderness of his bride, since he led her to the altar, and which make her so much more than he ever bargained for! Is it not a sounder view of the case, that the matrimonial bond can not be held to include the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... refuses to grow old, just as the Alimentive refuses to grow up. She clings to her beauty as does no other type. She it is who self-sacrificingly starves herself to retain her slenderness, who massages and exercises and "cold-creams" herself hours a day before the shrine of Eternal Youth. Her high color, "all her own," is a ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... feet, and his young slenderness was full of strength and dignity, and his face, cleared of its sombre brooding, was full of a bright, untroubled decision. The cypresses upon the hilltops stood no more resolutely erect, the hills themselves were no more steadfast. "Nay," ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... ends and parings? Has he not all the beasts of the forest, and the cattle on a thousand hills? What does he want of economy? But his brother Jean has not ten thousand pounds a year,—nothing like it; but he makes up for the slenderness of his purse by boundless fertility of invention and delicacy of practice. John began sneering at Jean's soups and ragouts, but all John's modern sons and daughters send to Jean for their cooks, and the sirloins of England rise up and do obeisance to this Joseph with a white apron ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... to him several times for a light, or to apologise for the imaginary depredations of her poodle; but his mouth was closed in the presence of so superior a being, his French promptly left him, and he could only stare and stammer until she was gone. The slenderness of their intercourse did not prevent him from throwing out insinuations of a very glorious order when he was safely alone with ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for a beautiful English girl to wander in unchaperoned, especially when out of respect to the slenderness of her purse she gets off the beaten track in search of a ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... partly in shadow, and her figure foreshortened by her pose, which accentuated its rounded outline and concealed its willowy slenderness; but the broad white forehead and straight nose became visible when she moved her head a trifle, and a faintly humorous sparkle crept into the clear brown eyes. Possibly Maud Barrington looked her best just then, for the lower part of the pale-tinted face was ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... the spring. It did not, by far, take up the seeker's whole daily life. Only it was a thread that ran all through it, a dye that colored it. Many other factors—observations, occupations, experiences—were helping to make up that life, and to make it, with all its pathetic slenderness, far more than it was likely ever to have been made at Carancro. Through hundreds of miles of tramping the lad had seen, in a singularly complete yet inhostile disentanglement from it, the world of men; glimpses of the rich man's world with its strivings, steadier ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... for the library, which seems curiously extravagant for the officers of an "incipient" University, was Audubon's "Birds of America." At the present time it is worth many times the $970 paid for it then, but one wonders, in view of the extreme slenderness of the resources of the University, just what was the idea which led to its purchase. It was in any case an evidence of the interest of the Board in practical scientific studies and their sympathy with what was then the progressive movement ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... afterwards what it was. He stooped and filled his arms with wood, and walked ahead of her up the pathway to the kitchen door, and stopped when she flitted past him to show him where the wood-box stood. He was conscious then of her slenderness and of the lightness of her steps. He dropped the wood into the box behind the stove on which kettles were steaming. There was the smell of chicken stewing, and ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... Englishwoman evidently, gave a little sigh and looked round, regretting, apparently, that her husband was not by her side to look on the loveliness that woke a faint-hued fairy-tale in her heart. The same moment he entered the room and came to her. He was a man above the middle height, and from the slenderness of his figure, looked taller than he was. He had a vivacity of motion, a readiness to turn on his heel, a free swing of the shoulders, and an erect carriage of the head, which all marked him a man of action: ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... and shabby rag—and over it, because of the cold, a long black cloak, a relic of better days. Her splendid hair, uncombed and dishevelled, hung almost loose round her head and neck; and the emaciation of face and figure made her height and slenderness more abnormal than ever as she swept tempestuously ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... sirloins.' He laments that the English violet should develop into such an overblown peony, and speculates upon the whimsical problem, whether a middle-aged husband should be considered as legally married to all the accretions which have overgrown the slenderness of his bride. Should not the matrimonial bond be held to exclude the three-fourths of the wife that had no existence when the ceremony was performed? A question not to be put without a shudder. The fact is, that Hawthorne had succeeded ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... points of excellence in beauty?" "Yes," answered Badr al-Din Hasan, "Beauty consisteth in brightness of face, clearness of complexion, shapeliness of nose, gentleness of eyes, sweetness of mouth, cleverness of speech, slenderness of shape and seemliness of all attributes. But the acme of beauty is in the hair and, indeed, al-Shihab the Hijazi hath brought together all these items in his doggrel verse of the metre Rajaz, [FN489] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... came down the oak staircase singing. The white draperies of her summer gown trailed softly on the wide steps, and in her hands she carried a quantity of roses. A black ribbon was bound about her waist, and seemed only to emphasize the slenderness of her form. Her brown hair was waved loosely above her brow; it was not much less abundant, though much less bright, than in her girlhood. The freshness of youth had gone for ever; but her loveliness had depended less upon that radiant colouring which had once been ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... evidently sent out to find him. She was wearing her delphinium frock and the big blue hat with its single La France rose. She walked pensively, her head bowed; and, in that moment, by some trick of sense or spirit, he saw her vividly, as she was. He saw the grace of her young slenderness, the wild-flower colouring, the delicate aquiline of her nose that revealed breeding and character; the mouth that even in repose seemed to quiver with sensibility. And he thought: "Good Lord! How lovely ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... disguise! She wore her nurse's dress; for her second daily round began at half-past four, and her cloak, bonnet, and bag were lying ready on a chair beside her. The dress was plain brown holland, with collar and armlets of white linen; but, to Wharton's eye, the dark Italian head, and the long slenderness of form had never shown more finely. He hesitated ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heightened tattoo and he bent eagerly forward with his lips parted. She moved lightly through the luminance of a world which the moon had burnished into tints of platinum and silver, and she was very lovely, he thought, in her child-beauty and slenderness, the budding and virginal freshness that was only beginning to stir into a realization of something meant by womanhood. He bent, half kneeling, in his ambuscade with that dream of love which was all new and wonderful: ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... S———-. Having formerly inhabited Japan, and made a marriage Japanese fashion there, he is now satisfied to remain the friend of our wives, of whom he has become the 'Komodachi taksan takai' ("the very tall friend," as they say, on account of his excessive height and slenderness). Speaking Japanese more readily than we, he is their confidential adviser, disturbs or reconciles our households at will, and has infinite ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... her the story she already knew so well—how beautiful her mother was, the look of her hair and eyes, her slenderness, the music of her voice, and the gladness of ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... fantasy was assured Lady Powell-Carewe had Kedzie extracted from it. Then pondering her sapling slenderness, once more she caught from the air an inspiration. She would incase Kedzie in a sheath of soft, white kid marked with delicate lines and set off with black gloves and a hat of green leaves. And this she would ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes
... Amazons, but does not range to the south beyond the limits of the river plains. At that point an allied species, the White-whiskered Coaita (Ateles marginatus) takes its place. The Coaitas are called by zoologists spider monkeys, on account of the length and slenderness of their body and limbs. In these apes the tail, as a prehensile organ, reaches its highest degree of perfection; and on this account it would, perhaps, be correct to consider the Coaitas as the extreme development of the American type of apes. ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... or rubbed her nose without ceasing her contortions. Domini guessed that this was the girl whom she had seen from the tower dancing upon the roof in the sunset. Distance and light had indeed transformed her. Under the lamps she was the embodiment of all that was coarse and greasy. Even the pitiful slenderness of Irena seemed attractive when compared with her billowing charms, which she kept in a continual commotion that was ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... of her hair, another the slenderness of her form, the slimness of her ankles, and the smallness of her tiny hands and feet. One maiden remarked to another—but loud enough to be heard—on the brightness of her eyes which were clearer than the sapphires ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... wonderfully content; I never heard so much as a murmur escape one of them; they never exceeded their rations nor asked for a drop more of liquor than we had agreed among us should be served out. But, as I had anticipated, our security lay in our slenderness. We were too few for disaffection. The negroes were as simple as children, Wilkinson looked to find his account in a happy arrival, and if I was not, strictly speaking, their captain, I was their navigator without ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... from shoulder to throat. Then the blue jewel-bag was opened, and a nodding diamond tiger-lily to match the golden ones was carefully selected from a blinding array of brilliants, to glitter in her masses of copper hair. Round her neck went a rope of pearls that fell to the waist whose slenderness I had just, with a mighty muscular effort, secured; but not until she had dotted a few butterflies, bats, beetles and other scintillating insects about her person was she satisfied with the effect. At least, she was certain ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... shall his infect with softness, even as me His body with disease infects, of its seductive air. Yet, if with him forgotten be the troth-plight of our loves, I have a king who of his grace will not forget me e'er. His sides the tamarisk's slenderness deride, so lithe they are, Whence for conceit in his own charms still drunken doth he fare. Whenas he runs, his feet still show like wings,[FN140] and for the wind When was a rider found, except King ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... of the shawled figures moving toward the group on the steps walked one whose slenderness and grace marked her from the rest. A scarlet shawl splashed the cream of her garments. Unlike the other women, she wore no disfiguring handkerchief on her head. Her face, oval and creamy-brown, was framed ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... who had carried potatoes to George's door while he was off learning to follow the hounds. His immaculate, yet careless, dress; the perfection of his manner, which seemed to make him a part of the surroundings in which he stood; the very smoothness and slenderness of the hand that rested on Sally's chair—all these produced in me a curious and unreasonable ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... trickling from his long face, which, if pale, was no paler than its habit, a vestige of the smile with which he had proposed the toast still lingering on his thin lips, though departed from his eyes. An elegant gentleman was Mr. Wilding, tall, and seeming even taller by virtue of his exceeding slenderness. He had the courage to wear his own hair, which was of a dark brown and very luxuriant; dark brown too were his sombre eyes, low-lidded and set at a downward slant. From those odd eyes of his, his countenance gathered an air of superciliousness tempered by a gentle melancholy. For the ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... gloved hand to him and advanced alone to meet the ladies with a light firm step. Her long white train lent an additional grace to her figure, the wide and heavy folds of brocade serving to accentuate the slenderness of her waist. Andrea, as he followed her with his eyes, kept repeating her words to himself, 'I came for you alone—I came for you alone!' The orchestra suddenly took up the waltz measure with a fresh impetus. And never, through all his life, did he forget that music, nor the attitude ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... he went into the next room where Dossie lay in her own little bed beside his mother's, her little seven-year-old girl body stretched out in all its dainty slenderness (so unlike Stanny's. He saw with a pang of sudden passion the sweet difference). Her face, laid sideways in her golden-brown hair, showed already a fine edge, nose, and mouth and chin turned subtly, and carved out of their ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... the other hand, if the width is much more than three-quarters of the height, the page offends by looking too square. In the so-called "printer's oblong," formed by taking twice the width for the diagonal, the width is just under fifty-eight per cent of the height, and this is the limit of stately slenderness in a volume. As we go much over sixty per cent, the book loses in grace until we approach seventy-five per cent, when a new quality appears, which characterizes the quarto, not so much beauty, perhaps, except in small sizes, as a certain attractiveness, like that of a ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... being an Accident or an Affection of matter that relates to our Tongue, Palate, and other Organs of Tast, it may very possibly be, that the small Parts of a Body may be of such a Size and Shape, as either by their extream Littleness, or by their slenderness, or by their Figure, to be unable to pierce into and make a perceptible Impression upon the Nerves or Membranous parts of the Organs of Tast, and what [Errata: yet] may be fit to work otherwise upon divers other Bodies than meer ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... lace dress, almost severe in fashion, which gracefully emphasized her slenderness; and she sat with her knees crossed, the firelight twinkling on the beads of her slipper, on her silken instep, and flashing again from the rings upon the slender fingers she had ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... is nothing, O king, that equals Hope in slenderness. I had solicited many kings and found that nothing is so difficult of acquisition as an image that Hope sets before ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... different from the staidness of trousers! the rolls of hair entwined with so much art, and suggesting so much colour and perfume, so different from the bare crop; the unnaturalness of the waist in stays! plenitude and slenderness of silk, so different from the stupidity of a black tail-coat; rose feet passing under the triple ruches of rose, so different from the broad foot of the male. My love for the life of women was a life within ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... tailor are careful not to array stout persons in checks and plaids, but try to convey an impression of sylph-like slenderness through the use of vertical lines. On the other hand, you have doubtless noticed in recent years the checkerboard and plaid-covered boxes used by certain manufacturers of food products and others to make their packages look larger than ...
— Applied Psychology: Making Your Own World • Warren Hilton
... swaying delicately along the path, with something of the motion of a tall stalk of grass in the wind, wore a scanty white gown, which defined almost cruelly the slenderness of form, that seemed to have returned to the meagre uncertainty of young childhood. To-day, her light hair was strained back from her wide forehead, and knotted neatly under the brim of her rough straw hat. She looked ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... slightly above the middle height, whose slenderness made him seem taller. An old cloak, intended as much to disguise as to protect him, did not quite conceal a faultlessness of costume beneath it, after the fashion of the day. Waistcoats of three kinds, one within the other, a frilled shirt, and a well-adjusted ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... so beautiful that she held even her own sex dumb with admiration. She was tall, but not too tall for perfect grace; and slender, but with the slenderness of some young pictured goddess. She was dark, too, but with a pale clear skin that was more lovely than any dead blonde whiteness; and to crown her charms, she had long rippling hair of jet black hue that was parted from her brow and fell like a veil to her delicate arched feet, ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... supposed from his size and slenderness, was of the Light Bobs. Ensign Spooney, on the contrary, was a tall youth, and belonged to (Captain Dobbin's) the Grenadier Company, and he tried on a new bearskin cap, under which he looked savage beyond his years. Then these two lads went off to the Slaughters', and having ordered ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... admitted no defect in her country except the excessive weight of its women, combating in her person this national menace with every known system of dieting. For her every meal was a species of torment, and the procession of bocks in the smoking room a tantalizing agony. The slenderness achieved and maintained by will power only made more prominent the size of her frame, the powerful skeleton with heavy jaws and large teeth, strong and dazzling, which perhaps suggested Desnoyers' disrespectful comparison. "She ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... is more delicately framed than the English breed; the ears are also more pendulous, and feathered almost as much as those of a King Charles's spaniel. Notwithstanding, however, his apparent slenderness and delicacy, he yields not in courage, and scarcely in strength, to the British dog. There are few kennels in which he is found in which he is not ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... to discover any blood relationship between them. It is nevertheless almost absolutely certain that a relationship existed, though it may have been so remote a degree that the familiar term "forty-second cousin" would not have exaggerated the slenderness of the tie. The phenomena of heredity have been inattentively noted; its laws are imperfectly understood, even by Herbert Spencer and the prophets. My own small study in this amazing field convinces me that a man is the sum of his ancestors; that his character, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... of the AEgean gives place to an angular design, which he claims to be due to the influence of the conventional Egyptian way of representing water (p. 40). If this interpretation is correct—and, in spite of the slenderness of the evidence, I am inclined to accept it—it affords a remarkable illustration of the effects of culture-contact in the conventionalization of designs, to which Dr. Rivers has called attention.[328] Whatever explanation may be ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... him earnestly. Except for his flashing eye, he was not a figure to dread, for what he lost in height he gained in slenderness. He was indeed uncommonly slender. In fact, either he had forgotten to tell Flossie that he was a featherweight boxer, or she had forgotten to pass the information on. The most terrible thing about him ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... did not lose interest. The girl's hair was not so yellow where it grew on her head and framed the rather thin oval of her face, as in the thick-rolled mass behind, golden still with childhood's gold. Except for her tall slenderness she was not in the least like Billie Brookton; and she would have no great pretension to beauty had it not been for a pair of long, gray, thick-lashed eyes which looked out softly and sweetly on the world. Her nose was too small ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... rebaptized by its new proprietor with the name of Mare Nostrum, in memory of his uncle, turned out to be a dubious purchase in spite of its low price. As a navigator Ulysses had been most enthusiastic upon beholding its high and sharp prow disposed to confront the worst seas, the slenderness of the swift craft, its machinery, excessively powerful for a freight steamer,—all the conditions that had made it a mail packet for so many years. It consumed too much fuel to be a profitable investment as a transport ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and carved; there were a couple of faded allegorical pictures, by some Bolognese master, on the walls; and in a corner, among a stack of dwarf orange-trees, a little Italian harpsichord of exquisite curve and slenderness, with flowers and landscapes painted upon its cover. In a recess was a shelf of old books, mainly English and Italian poets of the Elizabethan time; and close by it, placed upon a carved wedding-chest, a large and beautiful melon-shaped lute. The panes of the mullioned window ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... and burly the contrast of her appealing fragility attracted him all the more. Had she not been so perfectly proportioned her size would have been a defect; but now it was simple that her delicacy of colour and feature demanded that slightness and slenderness of build. Her hair was of so burning a red-gold that its colour gave her precisely the setting that she required. She seemed, as she sat there, a little helpless, and Peter fancied that she was wishing him to understand that ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... on board the Desire, from talking with the company, Captain Davis requested he would consider the extremity of our estate and condition, the slenderness of his provision, and the weakness of his men, being in no case for undertaking that new enterprise; as, if the other ships were as ill appointed as the Desire, it would be impossible to perform his new ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... unto Like, and of incident very little. Light, often sparkling, conversations and charming bits of description follow each other in ready succession like beads upon a string. Lack of incident is atoned for by charm of writing, and in the vivacity of the scenes the reader disregards the slenderness of the connecting thread, or perhaps forgets to look for it. The style is easy and pleasant, while free from the slips to which "easy writers" are so prone. Of bright, witty sayings a number could easily be gathered as samples, but the readers ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... children: not those shining ones who were to have lived in the beautiful bare house with her and Zebedee, but sturdy creatures with George's mark on them. She would become middle-aged and lose her slenderness, and half forget she had ever been Helen Caniper; yet George and the children would always be a little strange to her, and only when she was alone and on the moor would she renew her sense of self and be ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... slenderness, his assiduous daily sword-practice had given Andre-Louis an arm of iron. Also he threw his weight into the thrust. His assailant reeled backwards a few steps, and then his heel struck a baulk of timber left on ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini |
