"Filmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unfathomable mystery there is in it all!" he said one day. Taking up a wineglass, he continued: "Suppose I choose to call this a character, fancy it a man, endue it with certain qualities; and soon the fine filmy webs of thought, almost impalpable, coming from every direction, we know not whence, spin and weave about it, until it assumes form and beauty, ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... Kennedy attracted our attention. Caught in the filmy lace folds of the woman's dress he had found a few small and thin pieces of glass. He was regarding them with an interest that was oblivious to everything else. As he turned them over and over and tried to fit them together ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... the road is overtopped by masses of noble forest. The old park of Brandon lies there, more than four miles from end to end. These masses of solemn and discoloured verdure, the faint but splendid lights, and long filmy shadows, the slopes and hollows—my eyes wandered over them all with that strange sense of unreality, and that mingling of sweet and bitter fancy, with which we revisit a scene familiar in very remote and early childhood, and which has haunted a long interval of maturity and ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... building into the cool, starlit night. People were strolling about in evening clothes, hatless, the women in white opera cloaks and filmy gowns, their silk-stockinged feet very much in evidence, resembling almost some strange kind of tropical birds with their little shrill laughter and graceful movements, as they made their way towards the Club or round to the Rooms, or to one of the restaurants for supper. Whilst Hunterleys ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... could they dream the truth—or descry the hidden skeleton at the festival, wreathed in flowers and veiled with glittering, filmy draperies, which yet put forth its bony fingers to beckon ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... her heart that she lives and has her being; it is that she may find favor in his sight that she brushes the hair he has kissed; it is with the hope that his eye may be caught, his fancy pleased, that she puts the flower at her bosom or winds the filmy lace around her neck. And it was of Drake—Drake—Drake—she thought and dreamed as she turned from the glass and went down ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... belts and levers, pinions and screws Wherewith small man has eked his body out, And made himself a mighty, weary giant. In labour close they pass the murky day, 'Mid floating dust of swift-revolving wheels, And filmy spoil of quick contorted threads, Which weave a sultry chaos all about; Until, at length, old darkness, swelling slow Up from the caves of night to make an end, Chokes in its tide the clanking of ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... was, fulfilled of happiness, But O! it went so fast, too fast away. Then came that trouble which full oft doth bless— It was the evening of a sultry day, There was no wind the thread-hung flowers to stir, Or float abroad the filmy gossamer. ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... near, and the light beneath the trees grows yellower, and the air is full of filmy insects out for their last dance, the voice of the little river becomes louder and more distinct. The true poets have often noticed this apparent increase in the sound of flowing waters at nightfall. Gray, in one of his letters, speaks of "hearing the murmur of many waters not audible ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... stood surrounded by the escort of noble Matrons of Honor most sumptuously clad, whom Venice had appointed to act as sponsors in the ceremonial of the Adoption. She was like a snow-drop in a garden of exotics—so pale and fair and young, in her robes of filmy lace from the cushions of Burano—the great pearls of Janus rising and falling with the frightened throbbing of her breast. Her mother only stood beside her under the canopy—her hand clasping that of her ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... or else been better skilled in the gentle art of flirting than he believed. But she slept on, unconscious, with slow, regular breathing, so still that he could see the beat of her heart under the filmy stuff ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... at her feet. The gondola moved on between the sea-weed banks. Away off by Chioggia, filmy gray clouds grew ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... threshold, a white something caught his eye. He picked it up. Her handkerchief! A moment he held the dainty, filmy thing in his rough hand. A vague perfume reached his ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... and quickly and deftly began her preparations for dinner. Inga had been married a few weeks before, and so Norma had no maid. She put her new hat into its tissue paper, and tied a fresh checked apron over her filmy best waist, and stepped to and fro between stove and dining table, as efficient a little housekeeper as all ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... Baron, and there stuck. 'Wife you cherish,' whispered the denounced one; and, thus primed, the inexorable Baron resumed, and, having reached 'Wife you cherish,' stuck again. 'Children you adore,' whispered Jim the Penman, gazing upward at his tyrant with filmy eyes ...
— The Making Of A Novelist - An Experiment In Autobiography • David Christie Murray
... sudden twitch to a delicate ruffle, which she had begun to arrange upon the corsage of a dress, to show Mona how she wanted it, she made a great rugged tear in the filmy fabric, thus ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... all, Miss Lydia wandered in her full black gown, putting aside her filmy ruffles as she tied back a hanging spray or pruned a broken stalk, sometimes even lowering her thread lace cap as she weeded the tangle of sweet Williams and touch-me-not. Since her gentle girlhood she had tended bountiful ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... that night, shook their heads and said there was snow on the tail of it. Morning found the ground mottled with splashes of white and a fine, frost-like sleet blowing fitfully across the plain. The ridge of trees over against the shore became vague and shapeless beneath the filmy veil, while the sea out beyond the breakers was clothed in a grey shroud, ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... in the excited mind of Anne Withero. It seemed to her that Charles Merchant sat, a filmy ghost, beside this tattered fugitive. He was speaking the same words that Andrew spoke, but his voice and his manner were to Andrew Lanning what moonshine is to sunlight. She had been thinking of Charles Merchant as a social asset; she began to think of him now as a possessing ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... by the Russian ambassador." This writer tells us, "It was diverting to see how the pelican would toss up and turn a flat fish, plaice or flounder, to get it right into its gullet at its lower beak, which being filmy stretches to a prodigious wideness when it devours a great fish. Here was also a small water-fowl, not bigger than a more-hen, that went almost quite erect like the penguin of America. It would eate as much fish as its whole body weighed, yet ye body did not appear to swell the ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Thou deservest. Thou hast taken away all my sons. Now then the devil may have my soul, for Thou shalt never have it.' The death-rattle was heard in his throat, and Hugh sprang forward to help him: he was still stiffly upright, still looking (though with filmy eyes) at the wall, still trying to shape in words his wicked vaunts. No words came from him; his jaw dropped before his strong old body. They brought him the Sacrament; his soul rejected it—too clean food. Hugh ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... order to examine a star cluster, No. 4173, which was especially admired by Sir William Herschel, who discovered that it was not, as Messier had supposed, a circular nebula. Herschel regarded it as the richest mass of stars in the firmament, but with a small telescope it appears merely as a filmy speck that has sometimes been mistaken for a comet. In 1860 a new star, between the sixth and seventh magnitude in brilliance, suddenly appeared directly in or upon the cluster, and the feeble radiance of the latter was almost extinguished ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... against the bronze richness of the season. Bess Anderson played the wedding march, as we two came up the aisle together and met Dr. Hemingway at the chancel rail. I was in my young manhood's zenith, and I walked the earth like a king. Marjie wore my mother's wedding veil. Her white gown was soft and filmy, a fabric of her mother's own choosing, and her brown wavy hair ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... was the only one outside, for Rachel Guest was dreaming her own dream, with an extremely practical side to it, unless Biddy and I were mistaken. She wore Monny's clothes, and used her special perfume, and took advantage of the same initials, to accept gifts of filmy handkerchiefs and monogrammed bags and brushes. Also she had firmly annexed most of the men on board who would, in normal states of mind, have belonged to the Gilded Rose. But they all seemed to have gone mad on the subject of Miss Guest. Even Harry Snell, who had ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... under an eddying blast of steam the massive locomotives charged past us once more, while I felt a thrill as I watched them, and envied Grant, the engineer. It was something to hold that power in the hollow of one's hand. Thick white powder whirled aloft like smoke before them, a filmy wavy mass that seemed alive rolled aside, while presently the whistle boomed in triumph, and there was an exultant shout from the passengers, for steam had vanquished the snow, and the road lay ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... took his place, and feeling a desire for solitude and for a last long look at the earth, he crossed the top of the ridge on the slope of which they had camped, and lay down on the farther side. The South wind in the upper air rushed along in the mighty whirl, occasionally carrying filmy clouds across the faces of the moons; but about Ayrault all was still, and he felt a quiet and serene repose. He had every intention of remaining awake, and was pondering on the steadfastness of the human heart and the constancy of ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... his friend, talking earnestly together. The friend stood with his back toward her, but his face she saw distinctly, and that smile was on his lips, cold, crafty, almost contemptuous. Was it Jameson, or only something mocking her from the mirror? She went to the window, drew aside the filmy lace, and looked forth. Truly it was her lover; through an interstice of the apple boughs she saw him distinctly, and he saw her—that smile, surely the gloomy old mirror had reflected awry. How brilliant, how full of love was the whole expression of his face. Again ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... freshet had frozen on the slanting stone, and was one coat of ice; poor Nest fell, and put out her hip. No more flushing rosy color on that sweet face—no more look of beaming innocent happiness;—instead, there was deadly pallor, and filmy eyes, over which dark shades seemed to chase each other as the shoots of agony grew more and more intense. She screamed once or twice; but the exertion (involuntary, and forced out of her by excessive pain) overcame her, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... the sun's return, she wore a white frock (some filmy crinkled stuff, crepe-de-chine perhaps), and carried a white sunshade, a thing all frills and furbelows. This she opened, as, leaving the shadow of the pines, she moved by the brook-side, down the lawn, where the unimpeded sun shone hot, ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... day at a fair, jigging outside a booth in red bodice and spangles, a waif, a little who-knows-who, suppose her pretty to death—what is she even then but an iridescent bubble, as one might say, thrown up by some standing pool of vice, as filmy, very nearly as fleeting, and quite as poisonous? It struck him as he watched—not the girl in particular, but a whole genus centred in her—as really extraordinary, as an obliquity of Providence, that ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... departed soul. But there was no landmark to show where little Billy was hidden from their loving eyes, unless it was in the old hill of Lisnavoura, that cast its long shadow at sunset before the cabin-door; or that, white and filmy in the moonlight, in later years, would occupy his brother's gaze as he returned from fair or market, and draw from him a sigh and a prayer for the little brother he had lost so long ago, and was ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... side, and went out wi' Jeremiah, as well as could be. I cannot take it in; tell me, Kester.' She kept trembling so much in voice and in body, that he saw she could not stir without danger of falling until she was calmed; as it was, her eyes became filmy from time to time, and she drew her breath in great heavy pants, leaning all the while against the ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. III • Elizabeth Gaskell
... vaguely. She had never asked herself the question. Then Beth sat with her work on her lap for a little, looking up at the summer sky. It was an exquisite deep blue just then, with filmy white clouds drawn up over it like gauze to veil its brightness. The red roofs and gables and chimneys of the old house below, the shrubs, the dark Scotch fir, the copper-beech, the limes and the chestnut ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... soul—these monstrous elemental Truths that underlie all things. As Father Robert's deep vibrating voice spoke, it appeared to Anthony as if the room, the walls, the house, the world, all shrank to filmy nothingness before the appalling realities of these things. In that strange and profound "Exercise of the senses" he heard the moaning and the blasphemies of the damned, of those rebellious free wills that have ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... burning all night long, and in their cold white rays I could at first see nothing amiss. I looked along an orderly lane, an empty glass counter on my left, glass cupboards of untouched silver on my right, and facing me the filmy black eye of the peep-hole that shone like a stage moon on the street. The counter had not been emptied by Raffles; its contents were in the Chubb's safe, which he had given up at a glance; nor had he looked at the silver, except to choose a cigarette case for me. He had confined ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... Booth came into view at that instant, and his lips were closed. The painter was laying a soft, filmy scarf over the girl's bare shoulders as he ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... and dark shaggy firs: they now looked wan and spectral in the fading light. For a fleeting moment the world glowed like a huge golden ball; then the whole countryside was one vast vista of green, finally merging into a deep illimitable purple. Down the valley crept the mist, trailing its filmy veils over point and peak and ridge. The air throbbed with the cries of geese and bitterns. The hush of the spring-time night set in and covered the world—that hush that is more vibrant than thunder, that gathers the forest sounds ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... strange to see Helen in filmy summer dress instead of the severe uniform of a nurse, and Zaidos missed the white cap on her beautiful hair, but he decided finally that she was even prettier without it. Zaidos could not keep from watching her every move. She ordered Tony about ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... to go to such a lot of trouble? I tell you, it pays to stay away sometimes, they think such a lot more of you! This is from Mother," she added, as she pried off the cover of a big dressmaker's box, and lifted out a filmy dancing frock of ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... moral soul he learns to trace, That stronger chain which links and leads the race; Which forms and sanctions every social tie, And blinds or clears their intellectual eye. He strips that soul from every filmy shade That schools had caught, that oracles had made, Relumes her visual nerve, develops strong The rules of right, the subtle shifts of wrong; Of civil power draws clear the sacred line, Gives to just government its right divine, Forms, varies, fashions, as his lights increase, Till earth is fill'd ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... back across her ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved shell comb, and twisted a shawl of flame-colored silk—it was a manton, she instructed him—about her shoulders. The guise of Andalusia was very becoming to her. For a dinner, Savina wore the filmy white and emeralds; they went to a restaurant like a pavilion on a roof, their table, by a low masonry wall, overlooking the harbor entrance. The heat of the day, cloaked in night, was cooled by the trade wind moving softly across ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... milky glass—apparently decomposing, throwing out filmy threads of clear glass and bubbles of glass which break, liberating a gas (fluorine?) which, attacking the white-hot platinum, causes rings of color to appear round the specimen. I have now been using the apparatus for nearly a month, and in its earliest days it led me right ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... mere "traveller's tale." It is not, however, so generally known that this Sea is peculiarly blue, so blue, in fact, that were you to dip a white dress into it it would come out blue, or at least it looks as if it would. It reminds me of a splendid blue silk with filmy white lace spread over it. Against this the figures on the shady side of the ship look very pretty; ladies and children and menkind all in such various bright, summery colours, lying in long chairs or grouped round green card tables. "The Ladies' ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... produces a stiffness for my beautiful wife to mount upon me and then have our charming son to put his prick into her bottom for this, too, is necessary to my failing vigour, and the contact of his vigorous young prick against the thin filmy substance separating us feels as nothing. I am long in spending, and his delighted mother gets two and sometime three delicious discharges in her arse before my lazy prick deluges her cunt ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... a very good dancer, and her heart beat as she unpacked the ball-dress her husband had ordered for her from a fashionable dressmaker in Posen. She could very well have worn her blue silk again if the rats had not been nibbling it! However, this filmy white gauze, with its long flowing sash and a small bouquet of artificial roses for the bodice and another for the hair, was certainly much prettier; there was an underskirt of silk, too, which rustled and ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... a filmy white robe, is dropping flowers in the path of Apollo (the sun) as he drives his dun-colored horses above the sleeping Earth. The Horae (the hours), a gliding, dancing group of lovely beings, accompany ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... use," said Garcia, his eyes filmy with despair, as if he were dying. "She will get there. The ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... Filmy shadows fall from the trees without, gradually outlining themselves upon the walls of the room, and the steps from the verandah. The hot air rises ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the ocean had lost its color. Heavy blue-white clouds with shredded, filmy foundations, which seemed almost to sweep the waters, moved swiftly to the westward, while in the background the wall of mist advanced silently to encompass them. They could feel ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... to the girl, who welcomed me with a smile. I had thought her pretty in her V.A.D. dress, but now, in a filmy black gown and with her hair no longer hidden by a cap, she was the most ravishing thing you ever saw. And I observed something else. There was more than good looks in her young face. Her broad, ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... in the sky, but the great heat had caused a haze to overlie the valley, gathering thickly along the winding course of the river, and hanging in little sprays and feathers over the woodlands which clothe its banks. Through this filmy vapour there broke from time to time fierce sparkles of brilliant light as the sun's rays fell upon breastplate or headpiece. Now and again the gentle summer breeze wafted up sudden pulses of martial music to our ears, with the blare of trumpets and the long deep snarl of the drums. As ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in a filmy material which lent an evanescent charm to her slender figure, came down the front steps as he was about to enter the area way below. The girl looked at him and her eyes suddenly widened; she stopped. ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... that had surfaced just behind her was so close that Jeff wondered if its species' legendary good nature had been misrepresented. It floated like a glistening plum-colored island, flat dorsal flippers undulating gently on the water and its great filmy eyes all but closed against the slanting glare ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... for sake of their own health and advantage, to tend. The villagers had received them civilly, but without enthusiasm. When tackled on the subject of their religious opinions, most of them declined to answer, except Mr. Twitt, who, fixing a filmy eye sternly on the plain and gloomy face of Mr. Arbroath, ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... gracefully formed body, the rounded limbs, the long chest and the feminine pelvis strike one at the first glance. The texture of the skin is smooth as a baby's, and sometimes velvety to the touch. Its color may be an opaque white, or faintly creamy, or there may be an effect of a filmy sheen over a florid complexion. Little or no hair on the face contributes to the general feminine aspect in the more extreme types. They are often double jointed ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the filmy umbra it advanced to the center, thus hiding its half-naked double writhing in the embrace of the deluded lover, and clearly revealed itself in long sweeping garments of pure white—fit grave clothes for one lately entombed—with great masses of loosened black hair falling like a pall ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... that when I woke I had no idea where I was. All re-collections of the voyage and arrival were wiped from my memory and I was filled first with vague astonishment and then with horror to find myself surrounded by filmy white stuff through which peered a black face. It was only my ayah, a quaint, small person, wrapped in a white sari, with demure, sly eyes and teeth stained red with chewing betel-nut, looking through the mosquito-curtains to see if the Miss Sahib was awake and would like chota-hazri. ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... limousine came upon another car, stationary and in trouble. A man in evening dress was holding an electric lamp for the chauffeur to peer under the bonnet, and standing beside him was a woman in black, wearing a filmy purple cloak. ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... compassion, and thereby diminished his resistance to her. Jonas Bronck's hand, in its red-hot seclusion behind the log, writhed and smoked, discharging its grosser parts up the chimney's shaft. Unseen, it lay a wire-like outline of bone; unseen, it became a hand of fairy ashes, trembling in every filmy atom; finally an ember fell upon it, and where a hand had been some bits of lime lay ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... din bewildered her; the ferment had no more meaning, no more method, than a schoolboy's game. But her eyes, passing over the chaos of paint-pots, brushes, and step-ladders, told her the place had been transformed. The ceiling between the four pendants had become a blue heaven with filmy clouds, and Cupids scattering roses before a train of doves and a recumbent goddess, whom a little Italian, perched on a scaffolding and whistling shrilly, was varnishing for dear life. Around the walls— sky-blue also—trellises of vines and pink roses clambered around the old panels. The energy ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... seemed, there approached from the northward A senior soul-flame Of the like filmy hue: And he met them and spake: "Is it you, O my men?" Said they, "Aye! We bear homeward and hearthward To list to ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... and cried, Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmur'd like a noon-tide bee Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me?—And I replied No, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... established; it was a beautiful day. It was one of these mornings typical of the hour; it looked like morning, smelt like morning, there was the distinct, clean, pure, inspiring feel of morning. The skies were an even turquoise with little filmy, fleecy shreds of clouds drifting across; the air was elixir; and the blue waters, capped here and there with white, ran joyously to meet the green sloping shores, where the haze still lingered. Ahead, an island glowed like ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Mr. Brewster smiled at Polly in her gala attire. Anne looked sweet and lovely in her simple dress, but the host could not quite make out the style the city girls wore. He was not accustomed to boudoir gowns of filmy lace and thin silk, and he thought they were a new style of party dress. Had he known what Barbara proposed wearing, he would have asked her ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... nerveless hangs the arm that swayed So proudly that terrific blade. The feeble bosom scarce can give A throb to show he yet doth live, And in his eye the light which glows, Is but the stare, that death bestows. The filmy veins that circling thread The cooling balls are turning red; And every pang that racks him now, Starts the cold sweat up to his brow, But yet his smile not even death Could from his boyish face unwreath, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... were much alike, but we could see back in the distance a beautiful cascade of fully 1000 feet in which the second stream originated, and we distinguished it by that name. All day we travelled over a rancher's paradise, meeting no Indians and seeing no recent signs of any except in some filmy smoke mounting mysteriously from canyons in the tangled sandstone labyrinth below. Who were they, how many, and what might be their temper? were questions that came to us as we reflected on the presence there of unknown human beings, and furthermore would we meet them, and if so when? As on the ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... the tiny click of the lock, extinguished the candle, and rustled stealthily out of the room, leaving in the darkness the malign and hag-like face on which the candle had just shone still floating filmy ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localise them, people surrounding emptiness with more than ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... not find tongue, and she drew yet farther away. The man, or the devil, watched her as she groped for the shawl, found it and quickly wound its filmy length around her beautiful shoulders and arms. An expression of cynical ...
— The Devil - A Tragedy of the Heart and Conscience • Joseph O'Brien
... upon the ground were lovely. Large as a lady's veil, ribbed satin, rose and purple, pink and scarlet, the filmy edges curled delicately, they hinted the elegance and luxury of a pretty woman's boudoir. And, like all such dainty trifles, the charming flower that hangs like a colored lamp in the green chapel of the banana-grove it is useless after it has served its brief purpose. ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... obviously not listening very attentively to Jean's enthusiastic explanation of her plan for the afternoon. He kept his eyes lowered. They rested on the handkerchief he had picked up, but hardly as if, after all, they saw it, though he turned the filmy square from corner to corner with an air partly of nervousness, partly ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Gestalt," this monstrous vision, floating about upon the filmy photographs of murky Hades, stand still, emerge into light, and ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... of that strange wavelike formation, the Jebel el-Fahst, which bounds the right (southern) bank of the Wady Makn. Presently we sighted the Jebel el-Maru', the strangest spectacle. The apex of the gloomy porphyritic trap is a long spine of the tenderest azure-white, filmy as the finials of Milan Cathedral, and apparently melting into thin air. Its crest seems abnormally tall and distant; and below it a huge grey vein, horizontal and wavy, cuts and pierces the peaklet ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... cloak fell back from her arm, which was uncovered but for the filmy sleeve that reached a little below the shoulder. He noted its fine curves and the silky smoothness of her skin. Although he fastened the clasp with a workman's firm touch, he thrilled. Then the crowd forced them on and they found Duveen waiting by the car. When they stopped ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... Helena von Ritz, who had lived tragedy all her life, and now was in the climax of such tragedy, was smiling and debonaire as though she had never been anything but wholly content with life! She was robed now in some light filmy green material, caught up here and there on the shoulders and secured with silken knots. Her white neck showed, her arms were partly bare with the short sleeves of the time. She stood, composed and easy, a figure ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... Crumbling—fading—nothing finished. I planned so much. Life runs, Francesco, while one sits and thinks. Nothing finished. My manuscripts—do with them what you will. I could not even write like other men—this poor left hand." He lifted the filmy lace ruffle falling across his hand. He smiled ironically at the costly folds, as they fluttered from his fingers. "A man is poor who has few wants. Then I have not been poor. But there is nothing left. It will be ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... Between the filmy white curtains at these windows she could see the rosy vestiges of the orchard bloom. The furniture of the room was apparently ivory, the bathroom silver and porcelain. Azure and white coloring were in all the decorations. The maid was unpacking her boxes. Geraldine ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... Sunday noon. We had been to church that morning together—Ruth, Will and I—and Robert Jennings was expected for our mid-day dinner at one-thirty. He hadn't arrived when we returned at one, and after Ruth had taken off her church clothes and changed to something soft and filmy, she sat down at the piano and played a little while—five minutes or so—then rose and strolled over toward the front window. She seated herself, humming softly, by a table there. "Bob's late," she remarked and lazily reached across the table, opened my auction-bridge ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... lesson that his best plans might be foiled, he was furious when doubt was cast upon this pet design. Like a giant of a spider at the nucleus of his web, he watched the broad fan of radiant threads, and the hovering of filmy woof, but without the mild philosophy of that spider, who is versed in the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... summer. The truth is, that in many senses we are still in mid-Renaissance. The evolution has not been completed. The new life is our own and is progressive. As in the transformation scene of some great Masque, so here the waning and the waxing shapes are mingled; the new forms, at first shadowy and filmy, gain upon the old; and now both blend; and now the old scene fades into the background; still, who shall say whether the new scene ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... we approached, "let's get this scene now—number one twenty-six. Loring—Gordon! Shake a leg—here, I'll read it again. 'Daring enters. He is scarcely seated at the desk, examining papers, when Zelda enters in a filmy negligee. Daring looks up amazed and Zelda pretends great agitation. Daring is not unkind to her. He tells her he has not discovered the will as yet. Spoken title: "I am sure that I can find a will and that you are provided for." Continuing scene, Daring speaks the above. Zelda thanks him ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... had carried a big, square package out to the table before the kitchen window and untied with fluttering fingers the string that bound it. The little scarlet blouse and shimmering skirt, alive with tinsel that glinted under the light, still lay there beside the thin-heeled slippers and filmy silk stockings. She bent over them, patting them lovingly with a slim hand, her eyes velvety dark ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... the children. The brilliant sunshine of the High Garden in which they had listened to the tale became instantly palest moonlight, and between them and the strawberry bed they saw the filmy plaid of the Grey Spectre of the House of Ivor. It had been helpful and even laudable to play-act the chief scenes when the story was beginning, but now they had no time. It would have been an insult to the interest of ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... am, William Dent!" he cried, and drawing from his pocket two little wisps of reddish hair, he held them to his cheeks like side-whiskers and danced about the studio with the filmy graces of a ballet-girl. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a smart little steel-buckled shoe and a filmy blue silk stocking. The other was clad in a stout and rather ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... found her in the music room. She had taken the chair which Judge Wilton had occupied an hour before, and was leaning one elbow on an arm of it, her chin resting in the cup of her hand. Her dress—a filmy lavender so light that it shaded almost to pink, and magically made to bring out the grace of her figure—drew his attention to the slight sag of her ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... night I had gone farther. It was somewhere in the far west, where there are orchards and gardens, and great broad lawns that slope down to trees by the river. A great red moon rose that night through mists of sunset, and thin, filmy clouds, and I wandered by a road that passed through the orchards, till I came to a little hill, with the moon showing above it glowing like a great rose. Then I saw figures pass between me and the moon, one by one, in a long line, each bent double, ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... is the very last stitch to be taken on your trousseau, Charlotte," said Letitia, as she laid down the filmy garment she had been adorning with blue bowknots. "Press it, Sallie, and lay it with the rest of the set in the second tray of the medium-sized trunk. You can lock it and ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a glance: then the filmy eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu were raised from the book, turned in my direction, and all ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... stage they took their seats in tiers, a lovely spectacle. At the last came the Red Cross workers, the nurses, the motor corps and others in war service. The picture ended with a gay group of debutantes in filmy chiffon gowns to symbolize the present day of rejoicing. The triumphs of women in the intellectual field were told in the program that followed: Education—Professor Maria L. Sanford; Medicine—Dr. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... her to walk by clinging to her finger, would almost as soon have parted with her son as the little Electra. For five years the widow had toiled by midnight lamps to feed these two; now oppressed nature rebelled, the long over-taxed eyes refused to perform their office; filmy cataracts stole over them, veiling their sadness and their unshed tears—blindness was creeping on. At his father's death Russell was forced to quit school, and with some difficulty he succeeded in obtaining a situation in a large dry-goods store, where his labours ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... together, and hanging down before him.[118] Other critics say that his air and voice are too abstract, and 'you catch the sound as though he were communing with himself. It is as though you saw a bright picture through a filmy veil. His countenance, without being strictly handsome, is highly intellectual. His pale complexion, slightly tinged with olive, and dark hair, cut rather close to his head, with an eye of remarkable depth, still more impress you with the abstracted character of his disposition. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... long before. How long? For days, at least, perhaps a week, that wretched buck was dying hopelessly a death that would not come. His gaunt sides, his parched and lolling tongue, less than a foot from the snow and yet beyond reach, the filmy eye, whose opaque veil of death was illumined again with a faint fire of fighting green as the new foe came. The ravens had picked the eyes out of the dead buck and eaten a hole in its back. They had even begun on the living ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... not distress, came over Miss Brown's face. She did not speak for come time, but then we saw her lips form the words, rather than heard the sound—"Father, mother, Harry, Archy;"—then, as if it were a new idea throwing a filmy shadow over her darkened mind—"But you will be ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Mr. Linden. Which rather shortly—put question brought Mr. Motley to a stand. Much as when one pushes on into daylight through the filmy finespun work of a spider, that respectable insect looks about, considering where he ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... falling. At dim-dawn they hung purplish-green and black. Slowly she stripped them from her gaunt and shapely limbs—her cold, gray garments shot with shadows stood revealed. Down dropped the black-blue robes, gray-pearled and slipped, leaving a filmy, silken, misty thing, and underneath I glimpsed her limbs of ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... civilization when he lay awake late one night, wrapped in a single blanket, beside the sinking fire. Dark columnar trunks rose about him, touched with the uncertain red radiance now and then cast upon them when little puffs of bitter wind stirred the blaze, and he could see the filmy wreaths of smoke eddy among the branches. He was cold and overtired; the day's march had been a long one; his shoulders ached cruelly after carrying a heavy load, and every joint was sore. Besides, his bed was unpleasantly hard, and he envied his companions, who had long ago sunk ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... In one spot the gush of the water violently agitated the sand, but without obscuring the fountain or breaking the glassiness of its surface. It appeared as if some living creature were about to emerge—the naiad of the spring, perhaps, in the shape of a beautiful young woman with a gown of filmy water-moss, a belt of rainbow-drops and a cold, pure, passionless countenance. How would the beholder shiver, pleasantly yet fearfully, to see her sitting on one of the stones, paddling her white feet in the ripples and throwing up water to sparkle ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... lost in it like a cat in a rug, enjoyed the thought of the force of the creature capable of wearing it lightly for a garment. Withal the rough, soft surface of it was agreeable to the hand. Out of one of the immense pockets hung the end of a coloured silk muffler, filmy as anything ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... white on their lower boughs, except when in some opening it had melted into dewdrops in the December sun, and still clung to the trees, ready when the sun had passed by them towards its setting to turn into filmy icicles. The sky was brilliant; the long winter already upon the earth smiled gently, as if to say that its reign would be mild. Stephen went along so much preoccupied that only the baying of his hound made him ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... miles away. Perhaps an ounce of explosive had been introduced into a rocket tube and fired. The smoke particles, naturally ionized, added their self-repulsion to the expansiveness of the explosive's gases. A cauliflowerlike shape of filmy whiteness appeared and grew larger ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... fantastic thing, of texture far more delicate than a spider's filmy web. It was a vision! A picture of an Indian camp, not painted on canvas nor yet written. It was dream-stuff, suspended in the thin air, filling the inclosure of the cedar wood container. As she looked upon it, the picture grew more and more real, exceeding ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... and how trimly each is attached to the very summit of its peak, like a streamer at a masthead; how smooth and silky they are in texture, and how finely their fading fringes are penciled on the azure sky. See how dense and opaque they are at the point of attachment, and how filmy and translucent toward the end, so that the peaks back of them are seen dimly, as though you were looking through ground glass. Yet again observe how some of the longest, belonging to the loftiest ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... houses—behold the Riviera, with groups of palms among tropical flowers, and feathery pepper-trees, graceful and large as giant willows! Then, when she had decided on Italy or Southern France as a simile, far-off, sharp mountain peaks, a dark, grotesquely branching pine in filmy distance, and a doll's house with a red pointed roof, suggested a sketch on a ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... a bit over the balustrade of the porch and shielding her eyes with her hand from the late afternoon sun, as she seemingly looks up the Pass to the left, as if expecting the approach of someone. Her gown is simple, girlish and attractive, and made of summery, filmy stuff. Her hair is done up in the simplest fashion, with a part in the centre, and there is about her every indication of an effort to assume that girlishness of demeanour which has been her greatest asset through life. WILLARD BROCKTON enters; he is a man six feet ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... Tide Have washed away, like weeds upon the sands, Crowds of the olden life's memorials; And 'mid the mountains you as well might seek For the lone site of fancy's filmy dreams. Towers have decay'd and moulder'd from the cliffs, Or their green age, or grey, has help'd to build New dwellings sending up their household smoke From treeless places once inhabited But by the secret sylvans. On the moors The pillar-stone, reared to ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... builded better than he knew. That phantom which perpetually attends and perpetually evades us,—the inevitable guest whose silence maddens and whose sweetness consoles,—whose filmy radiance eclipses all beauty,—whose voiceless eloquence subdues all sound,—ever beckoning, ever inspiring, patient, pleading, and unchanging,—this is the Ideal which Plato called the dearer self, because, when its ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... black vapours, in stretching bars, in shapeless patches, in sinuous wisps and tormented spirals. Over the courtyard and the house floated a round, sombre, and lingering cloud, dragging behind a tail of tangled and filmy streamers—like the dishevelled hair of a ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... Clad in robes of filmy material which glimmered white beside the gray robes of his underlings, the Duca wore about his waist the living flame of a girdle composed of alternate cut diamonds and blood red rubies each larger than a golf ball. And Kirby, searching ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... lost in the lagoons—Venice no longer visible behind; the Alps and Euganeans shrouded in a noonday haze; the lowlands at the mouth of Brenta marked by clumps of trees ephemerally faint in silver silhouette against the filmy, shimmering horizon. Form and colour have disappeared in light-irradiated vapour of an opal hue. And yet instinctively we know that we are not at sea; the different quality of the water, the piles emerging ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... answered Susette, as she slipped the silky fluff over the Violet's head, and fastened the one or two hooks that held it in place over the filmy undergarments in which the Violet stood waiting for its veiling. "Mon Dieu, what a beauty it gives you, and that placing of the tulle ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess |
