United States or Réunion ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
You do think that little red-haired girl quite perfection, now don't you, Rorie?" pursued Lady Mabel, sitting down before the piano again, and touching the notes silently as she seemed to admire the slender diamond hoops upon her white fingers old-fashioned rings that had belonged to a patrician great-grandmother.
But at Treport no one seemed to mind her being stupid, and indeed M. de Talbrun hardly thought of her existence, up to the moment when they were all nearly caught by the first wave that came rolling in over the croquet-ground, when all the girls took flight, flushed, animated, and with lively gesticulation, while the gentlemen followed with the box into which had been hastily flung hoops, balls, and mallets.
They were understood to be on a mission to assist Mrs Dale in the picking of the peas; but pleasure intervened in the way of business, and the young people, forgetting the labours of their elder, allowed themselves to be carried away by the fascinations of croquet. The iron hoops and the sticks were fixed. The mallets and the balls were lying about; and then the party was so nicely made up!
Jennings has a splutter of tease, and crude incivility, and shapeless tenderness, that you and I see every day; not so patent and demonstrative in our friend Mrs. Jones; but the difference is only in fashion: Mrs. Jennings was in scant petticoats, and Mrs. Jones wears hoops, thirty springs strong. How funny, too, the old love-talk!
Proscription has its advantages for one thing, it binds human hearts like hoops of steel. Yet it was not necessary here, for there was no waning of the honeymoon during that forty-odd years of married life. But scarcely had the petals fallen from the orange-blossoms before an event occurred that marked another milestone in the career of Phillips.
Though she hold herself against the shelf and tilt her hoops, it would not be possible to pass. She is absorbed in a book of the softer sort, and she flips its pages against her lap-dog's nose. But now behold the student coming up the street! He is clad in shining black. He is thin of shank as becomes a scholar. He sags with knowledge. He hungers after wisdom. He comes opposite the bookshop.
Compare the fashion plates of the seventeenth century with the fashion plates of the nineteenth, and you decide in favor of our day. The women of Isaiah's time beat anything now. Do we have the kangaroo fashion Isaiah speaks of the daughters who walked with "stretched forth necks?" Talk of hoops! Isaiah speaks of women with "round tires like the moon." Do we have hot irons for curling our hair?
"When we were conveyed in a state of dreadful suspense about three-quarters of a mile into the wood, the ruffians came into the coach, and, taking my keys, which I kept ready in my hand for them, opened three large trunks that contained my baggage, and emptying them of everything but my hoops and a few books, packed up their booty in a cloth; then robbed me of my money and jewels, even to my shoe-buckles and sleeve-buttons, took my footman's laced hat, and gave it, by way of gratification, to a peasant, who came from behind the bushes, and assisted them in packing.
She was about the same age as her companion, but was considerably taller, brown of complexion, slender, somewhat sickly, and dressed more than modestly. Her hair was short and curling, she wore a red kerchief over her head, and two hoops of silver in her ears. As they ate, they talked about themselves and their affairs. The boy had no longer either father or mother.
They read novels and flirted their fans, and powdered and patched themselves, and distended their petticoats with hoops, just as though there were no such persons in the world as the Duke of Cumberland and Charles Edward Stuart." Fiction, that most faithful and excellent handmaiden of history, here shows us no doubt very vividly what London as a whole thought and did in face of the rebellion.
Word Of The Day