"Hectic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... care about life, might have found their natural effect in making her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry light—sweet and woful to remember. Then——but why linger? I hurry to the close: ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... The hectic flush of the dying day was reflected on the window high above the altar, and, burning through the red mantle of the Christ, fell down upon the marble shrine like sacred, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to hear our laughter, and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. My God, Harry, how I worship her!" He was walking up and down the room as he spoke. Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. He was ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... brain was in a whirl. He leaned against the chair, faint and dispirited. The painful cough, the harbinger of that fatal malady which had already brought a sister to an early grave, oppressed him, and the hectic glowed upon his pale cheeks. The marshal approached him, and laid his hand gently on ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... infirmities, the disclosure of which, in demanding so much higher a degree of courage, is so much surer an evidence of love. I touched upon my college indiscretions—upon my extravagances—upon my carousals—upon my debts—upon my flirtations. I even went so far as to speak of a slightly hectic cough with which, at one time, I had been troubled—of a chronic rheumatism—of a twinge of hereditary gout—and, in conclusion, of the disagreeable and inconvenient, but hitherto carefully concealed, weakness ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... high-colored? Alas! no. And if I showed you satisfactorily that sin against the organic laws caused so great a proportion of blindness, how much more readily will you grant that the same sin gives to so many of our population the narrow chest, the hectic flush, the hollow cough, which makes the victim doomed, by his parent, to consumption and early death! Do you not see, every Sabbath, at church, the young man or woman, upon whose fair and delicate structure the ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... latest guest with a first glow of pseudo-hospitality, a hectic, haggard, perfunctory welcome like the specious smile of a demirep. The sophistical comfort came in reflected gleams from the decayed furniture, the ragged brocade upholstery of a couch and two chairs, a foot-wide cheap pier glass between the two windows, from one or two gilt picture ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... Monsieur Bazard's hectic visage flushed, he gave me a crazy stare, and, for a moment, I fancied there was murder in his bright eyes. Doubtless, however, devotion to his creed of non-resistance conquered the impulse, and he walked quickly away across the meadows, his skeleton hands ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, but with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in one where life is imagined ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... a flower Without the sun or rain; And now at twilight's hectic flush, She sang a ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... though I dreaded that she would be snatched away from me in the course of the interview; so frail and weak did it appear was her hold of life. In some respects I never saw her more lovely than she seemed on this very occasion. This was when the hectic of disease imparted to the sweetest and most saint-like eyes that were ever set in the human countenance, a species of holy illumination. Her countenance, now, was pale and colourless; however, and her look ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... kept indoors closely for a week except for frequent sallies after youthful strawberry snatchers. Then, a few days later, he suddenly emerged brilliantly radiant in the hectic glow of his belated ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... he died. At its first establishment it was amazingly crowded, and money flowed in upon him apace; and between whiles it languished and drooped: but for some years before its author's death it dwindled away so much, and fell into such an hectic state, that the few friends of it feared its decease was very near. The doctor, indeed, kept it up to the last, determined it should live as long as he did, and actually exhibited many evenings to empty benches. Finding no one at length would ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... could not finish the sentence. There was a hectic flush in his cheek and his thin, graceful frame shook violently from head to foot. Unable to speak for the moment, he waved his hand in a menacing gesture. The Wanderer ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... a dinner-party at James Smith's house, when Keats and Horace Smith were also among the guests. 'I seated myself,' writes Haydon,' right opposite Shelley, as I was told afterwards, for I did not then know what hectic, spare, weakly, yet intellectual-looking creature it was, carving a bit of broccoli or cabbage in his plate, as if it had been the substantial wing of a chicken. In a few minutes Shelley opened the conversation by saying in the most feminine ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... after the finding and losing of the treasure, the Desprez' had an anxiety of a very different order, and one which lay nearer their hearts. Jean-Marie was plainly not himself. He had fits of hectic activity, when he made unusual exertions to please, spoke more and faster, and redoubled in attention to his lessons. But these were interrupted by spells of melancholia and brooding silence, when the boy was little ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... decide whether you will profit by their experience of idle panic and idle regret, or whether you meanly prefer to palliate a servile imitation of their frailty by a paltry affectation of their repentance. It is now for you to show that you are not carried away by the same hectic delusions, to acts of which no tears can wash away the fatal ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... under Admiral Holmes, which lay near Cape Rouge. The forces on the south bank of the St. Lawrence simultaneously advanced up the shore from Point Levi, and having arrived opposite the squadron, were quietly taken on board, where they awaited further orders. Wolfe, with the germs of a hectic fever still rankling in his blood, was nevertheless actively engaged in reconnoitring the position both on the river and on land. And now we again meet for a few moments with our old friend, Mr. John Jervis. Eighteen years have passed over his head since we last met him ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... certain liking for Mrs. Eliott. She seemed to him an apparition mainly pathetic. With her attenuated distinction, her hectic ardour, her brilliant and pursuing eye, she had the air of some doomed and dedicated votress of the pure intellect, haggard, disturbing and disturbed. His social self was amused with her enthusiasms, but the real Dr. Gardner accounted for them compassionately. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... "Oh, brother!" and a hectic flush came over his chalky countenance, whilst a sardonic smile played over his features. "You can speak low enough now. 'Tis a pity that primogeniture is so little regarded in his Majesty's vessels of war; but methinks ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... crudities;[528] It is tobacco, which hath power to clarify The cloudy mists before dim eyes appearing; It is tobacco, which hath power to rarify The thick gross humour which doth stop the hearing; 20 The wasting hectic, and the quartan fever, Which doth of physic make a mockery, The gout it cures, and helps ill breaths for ever, Whether the cause in teeth or stomach be; And though ill breaths were by it but confounded, Yet that vild[529] medicine it doth far excel, Which by Sir Thomas ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... a moment of excitement, would be, as it were, melted down, and poured forth in the lava of a heated imagination. At such moments, the change in the whole man was wonderful. His meager form would acquire a dignity and grace; his long, pale visage would flash with a hectic glow; his eyes would beam with intense speculation; and there would be pathetic tones and deep modulations in his voice, that delighted the ear, and spoke movingly to ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... no desecration of a hallowed spot. When the past has been dead and buried a long while ago there is no sweeter decking for its grave than a rich autumn tangle, all yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, with glossy evergreens and soft, damp moss to keep up the illusion of spring and summer ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... unbelief" so largely due to Montaigne, a theological reaction was brought on not only in France but in all parts of the Christian world, and the belief in diabolic possession, though certainly dying, flickered up hectic, hot, and malignant through the whole century. In 1611 we have a typical case at Aix. An epidemic of possession having occurred there, Gauffridi, a man of note, was burned at the stake as the cause of the trouble. ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... with the purchases a sudden end was put to her help of the theatricals, and even, temporarily, to the French and painting lessons. If ever maid was grateful for the weary hours of training in fine sewing and embroidery, Janice was, as she toiled, with cheeks made hectic by excitement, over the frock in which her waking thoughts were centred. When finally the day came for the trying on, and it fulfilled her highest expectation, her ecstasy, unable to contain itself, was forced to find ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... was only languidly putting forth symptoms of returning life as I strode through the streets; a pale, sickly, unwholesome look on the face of the slothful Phoebus had succeeded the feverish hectic of the past night; the artisans whom I met glided by me haggard and dejected; a few early shops were alone open; one or two drunken men, emerging from the lanes, sallied homeward with broken pipes in their mouths; bills, with large capitals, calling attention to "Best ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... up and down the room, or working hard at the apparatus. His eyes were glistening, his cheeks hectic, and he had all the symptoms of high fever. "Heaven grant that Dick's diagnosis be not correct!" I thought, as I returned with the crowbar; and yet, as evening drew near, I found myself ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... hast thou learnt at last to jazz? Come take my arm, my clomplish boy;" O hectic day! Cheero! Cheeray! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... an effort sent apart The blood that curdled to her heart, And light came to her eye, And colour dawned upon her cheek, A hectic and a fluttered streak, Like that left on the Cheviot peak, By autumn's stormy sky; And when her silence broke at length, Still as she spoke she gathered strength, And armed herself to bear. It was a fearful sight to see Such high resolve ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... the body." Wherefore, he thinks it a wise course for all cold complexions to come to take physic in New England, and ends with those often quoted words, that "a sup of New England's air is better than a whole draught of Old England's ale." Mr. Higginson died, however, "of a hectic fever," a little more than a year after ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... brown people somewhere up in the Indian hill-country take care of itself, as all the rest of us always do. But some allowance must naturally be made for his peculiar temperament and for his particular state of health. Consumptive people are apt to take a somewhat hectic view of life in every way; they lack the common-sense ballast that makes most of us able to value the lives of a few hundred poor distant savages at their proper infinitesimal figure. At any rate, Ernest Le Breton, as a matter of fact, rightly or wrongly, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... was one of the frank displays of human hopes, yearnings, and vanities, that sometimes take place on steamboats. Feathers had a hectic brilliancy that proved secret, dumb longings. Pendants known as "lavaleers" hung from necks otherwise innocent of the costly fopperies of Versailles. Old ladies clad in princess dresses with yachting caps worn ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... the largeness of its ideas, and the artistic faultlessness of the machinery in this book, George Sand, with her Spiridon and Claudie, appears to us untrue and artificial; Dickens, with his but too faithful pictures from the popular life of London, petty; Bulwer, hectic and self-conscious. It is like a sign of warning from the New World to ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Mrs. Whitney noticed with alarm the hectic flush that dyed Kathleen's white cheeks. "I will fill his place. Come to think of it, I did not like his manner this morning when he asked for his wages, and he went out without ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... the end of the last war had been hectic, what with new organizational directives, the few sporadic revolts, the integration of homecoming fighters, and the final, tight set-up. But it had all been worth it. Everything was ...
— Final Weapon • Everett B. Cole
... part; and outside, one remembered, there were the rain-splashed streets, the homeless wind; and the toiling multitudes that made such delights possible, and gave of their dreary, sordid labour that we might sit thus at ease. The whole thing seemed artificial, soulless, hectic, unreal. One could not help thinking of Dives and Lazarus, that strange parable that has so stern a moral. "But now he is comforted and thou art tormented." It is not suggested there that vice is punished and virtue rewarded; merely that wealth is ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... decline of industry at home, and the loss of liberty. The patriot will see little to cheer him in this "golden age" of the national history, whose outward show of glory will seem to his penetrating eye only the hectic brilliancy of decay. He will turn to an earlier period, when the nation, emerging from the sloth and license of a barbarous age, seemed to renew its ancient energies, and to prepare like a giant to run its course; and glancing over the long interval since elapsed, during the first half of which ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... expressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no marriage, no war, no cruelty—man will be "tribeless and nationless." Though the earth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest imagination, the general effect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they are hectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers of bliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its admixture of evil, actually admits. ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... then, things were pretty hectic. Ed went from one to another of the loopholes he had cut, blasting first with the shotgun as the Harn crowded around, then using the .30 as ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... Linen Nurse. "Servants?" Very quietly she jumped down from the chair and came and stood looking up into the Senior Surgeon's hectic face. "Why, there aren't any servants," she explained patiently. "I've dismissed every one of them. We're doing our ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... and abstract subjects with such ease and grace, without for one moment laying aside the badge of authority, that they assume a mysterious fascination to catch the eye of the passerby. In his fictions he has sometimes cultivated a more hectic style, but that in itself constitutes one of the bases of its richness. Scarcely a word but evokes an image, a strange, bizarre image, often a complication of images. He is never afraid of the colloquial, never afraid of slang even, and he often weaves lovely patterns with ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... which consist of scraps and fragments (published in 1903) together with some letters, not a very weighty addition to the dead poet's fame. His translations of Walt Whitman I've not seen. Perhaps his verse is doomed; it was born with the hectic flush of early dissolution, but it is safe to predict that as long as lovers of rare literature exist the volume of prose will survive. It has for the gourmet of style an unending charm, the charm en sourdine of its creator, to whom a falling leaf or an empire in dissolution was of equal value. "His ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... ravages upon him that no medicine could permanently arrest. His sharp, dry cough, his short breathing, his profuse perspirations, more especially in the morning; the pinched-in nose, the hollow cheeks, of which the general pallor is only relieved by a hectic flush, the contracted lips, the too brilliant eye and wasted form — all bear witness to a slow but sure ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne
... a mortgage which would cover the cost of the work, and leave a comfortable balance. "We're not going to be as poor as I thought we were," he said cheerfully to Anna who had put in two hectic weeks on the apartment she had chosen because it was the cheapest in the market. "We've got something in the bank for emergencies, and ten thousand a year is two hundred ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... black, and pale, and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou, Who chariotest to ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... of his luckless profession. Woman as well as man is to him of the earth, earthy. He sees incipient disease where the uninitiated see only delicacy. A smile reminds him of his dental operations; a blushing cheek of his hectic patients; pensive melancholy is dyspepsia; sentimentalism, nervousness. Tell him of lovelorn hearts, of the "worm I' the bud," of the mental impalement upon Cupid's arrow, like that of a giaour upon the spear of a janizary, and he can only think of lack of exercise, of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Marcos de Aguilar was only a bachelor and not a licentiate, and therefore incapable of acting in that capacity. The cabildo of Mexico insisted that Aguilar was incapable of executing the high office to which De Leon had appointed him, on account of his age and infirmities; as he was a diseased hectic old man, who was obliged to drink goats milk, and to be suckled by a woman to keep him alive; they recommended therefore that Cortes should be associated with him in the government: But Aguilar insisted on adhering strictly to the testament ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... done him any harm, that was the point. He had tested the doctor's statement and found it incorrect. He had spent three hectic days and nights in New York, and—after a reasonable interval—had felt much the same as usual. And since then he had imbibed each night, and nothing had happened. What it came to was that the doctor was a chump and a blighter. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... Malcolm spy In Ellen's quivering lip and eye, 715 And eager rose to speak—but ere His tongue could hurry forth his fear, Had Douglas marked the hectic strife, Where death seemed combating with life; For to her cheek, in feverish flood, 720 One instant rushed the throbbing blood, Then ebbing back, with sudden sway, Left its domain as wan as clay. "Roderick, enough! enough!" he cried, "My daughter cannot ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... numbers were fairly evenly matched. About twelve days before this fateful day of September 3, 1914, there were approximately 100 German divisions as against seventy-five French, British, and Belgian divisions. But, during those twelve days, French and British mobilization advanced with hectic speed, while, at the same time, Germany was compelled to transfer ten or perhaps fifteen of her divisions to the eastern theater of war. It follows, therefore, that there were about 4,000,000 soldiers in all the armies that confronted ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... industry. Days of practice, months of study, years of struggle are part of the biography of almost every one who has attained real greatness. What a pity to destroy time-old illusions! Some prefer to think of their artist heroes dreaming their lives away in the hectic cafes of Pesth or buried in the melancholy, absinthe and paresis of some morbid cabaret of Paris. As a matter of fact, the best known pianists live a totally different life—a life of grind, grind, grind—incessant study, endless practice and ceaseless search for means to raise their ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... food convenient—true understanding. He will know how the work of God is moving in the congregations. He will be able to distinguish between true, spiritual success and that success which is noise and show alone. He will discern the difference between the rosy flush that signifies health and the hectic spot of burning red that speaks only of disease and death. He must look deep. He must look far. He must look constantly. He must look deep, because truth lies often at the bottom of a well, and the true state of the Church is not always according to superficial signs. He must look ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... This was worse than delirium. She saw that her sister's nature was so bruised and perverted, so warped, that she was almost insane. She slowly rallied back into physical strength, but her hectic cheek and slight cough indicated the commencement of consumption. Her mind remained in the same unnatural condition, and she kept saying to Edith, "You don't know anything about it at all. You can't know." She would not see Mrs. Hart, and agreed to go home with Edith only on ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... the Presentation ceremony which she had not been well enough to attend. He had stopped immediately, and the faint smile that was on his face had vanished from it, when the news of his son's illness reached him through the servant. But the hectic flush of triumph and pleasure which his interview with the Deputation had called into his cheeks, still colored them as brightly as ever, when Matthew Grice ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... arm was shrunken in its sleeve; and the golden hoops that encircled her wan wrists almost slipped from her hands as her long, scant fingers closed convulsively around Jack's. Her cheek-bones were painted that afternoon with the hectic of fever: somewhere in the hollows of those cheeks were buried the dimples of long ago; but their graves were forgotten. Her lustrous eyes were still beautiful, though the orbits were deeper than before. Her mouth was still ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... silently, day after day. Fainter, and fainter and fainter the flow, Of the current of life more sluggish and slow, And a ghastly glare in the glassy eye, And the wan cheek tinged with a hectic dye." ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... at other times, had never for a moment loosened its tenacious grasp. And although her cheerful words, and meek, uncomplaining looks, had often misled her anxious son, or, at least, prevented him from despairing of her recovery, yet the dry, parched, red tongue, the daily return of the bright hectic spot, and the tense, hurrying and unvarying beat of the strained pulses, might have told him how certainly and rapidly the work of destruction was going on at the citadel of life, and better prepared him for the agonizing scene which was now ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... banging, exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high-perched water-tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern and wheat-plateaus, the Southern ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... appearance, as he did so, was ghastly in the extreme. His beautiful black hair had been shorn away at the temples to permit his wound to be dressed, and his head was enveloped in bandages, stained in many places with blood; his face was pale as death, save a bright hectic spot in the centre of each cheek, fatal evidence of the inward fever which was consuming him. His classical features, already pinched and shrunken, their paleness enhanced by contrast with his black whiskers, were fixed and rigid as those ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... thickened. The testicles and the spermatic cord are oftentimes very tender and the seminal fluid is much thinner than natural. Such a Patient has generally dark spots under his eyes, a sharp nose, and often flushes of hectic color in his cheeks, particularly when in the presence of company, and there is more or less palpitation of the heart. In the second stage, as in the first, the pollutions are diurnal and nocturnal; the latter are copious and recur frequently. ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... was like Brigaut's. She slipped the note into the pocket of her apron. The hectic spots upon her cheekbones turned to a cherry-scarlet. These two children went through, all unknown to themselves, many more emotions than go to the make-up of a dozen ordinary loves. This moment in the market-place left ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... government establishes, or recognizes, conditions which are stable, reliable, and that may be counted on for more than two years, or four years, at a time. It has continuity, it preserves tradition, and it follows custom and common law. Such a government is neither hectic in its vicissitudes nor inquisitorial in its enactments. It is cautious in its expenditures, efficient in its administration, proud in maintaining its standards of honour, justice and "noblesse oblige." Good government is august and handsome; it surrounds itself with dignity ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... Easy Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Timminses'. A modest ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... pale son or two, and anon a lady with a waist drawed in to that extent that you wondered where her vital organs wuz. And how could any live creeter brook the agony them long steel cossets wuz dealin' the wearer? You could see this agony in the dull eyes, pale face and wan holler cheeks wearin' the hectic flush of red paint. And the little pinted shues, with heels sot in the very center of the nerves, ready to bring on ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... without once looking back, while I would have given all I possessed for one last wave. As he plunged into the sombre forest, where the early autumn frost of that north land had already tinged the maple woods with the hectic flush of coming death, so poignant was this last wresting from human fellowship, I could scarcely resist the impulse to desert my station and follow him. Poorer than the poorest of the tribes to whom he ministered, alone and armed only with his faith, this ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... entered he saw a figure standing at the foot of the great staircase. It was Mrs. Hart. She was trembling from head to foot and clinging to the railing for support. Her face was pale as usual; on each cheek there was a hectic flush, and her eyes were fastened ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... hectic series of events at Windles, a country house in Hampshire, where Billie's ideals still block the way and Sam comes on in spite ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... way. The owner of the voice (now again drowned) was apparently a youngster of twenty years—not more—clean of limb and feature, with a hot flush discolouring his good-looking face, a hectic glitter in his eyes, and a ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... year pre-eminently the season of thoughtful contemplation. Our autumn at home is mellow and harmonious, though sometimes melancholy; but the brilliancy of this decay strikes one sometimes with a sudden sadness, as if the whole world were dying of consumption, with these glittering gleams and hectic flushes, a mere deception of disease and death.... ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... face, so pathetic in its youth, with the ravages of disease visible in the hectic cheek, and harsh, rasping cough, touched the strong young officer. He stooped down and put his hand on the young lad's forehead; it was cold ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... a day passed in the chamber of the resigned creature, about two months after the first indication of her illness. Her disease had increased rapidly, and the signs of its ravages were painfully manifest in her sunken eye, her hectic cheek, her hollow voice, her continual cough. Her spirit became more tranquil as her body retreated from the world—her hopes more firm, her belief in the love of her Saviour—his will and power to save her, more clear, and free from all perplexity. I had never beheld so beautiful a sight as the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... exhausted, pleading looks, as she scolded and threatened, when the clock struck one, and the task was yet undone, and the head for a moment dropped, and the throbbing fingers were still. Those hollow coughs in which she would not believe—those hectic flushes that she would not see—and worse, those walks, those letters, at which she had connived, because the girls did so much better when they had some nonsense ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... resting on his mattock By the low portal; and just over right, His back against the lime-tree, his thin hands Lock'd in each other—hanging down before him As with their own dead weight—a tall slim youth With hollow hectic cheek, and pale parch'd lip, And labouring breath, and eyes upon the ground Fast rooted, as if taking measurement Betime for his own grave. I stopp'd a moment, Contemplating those thinkers—youth and age— Mark'd ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... permission: they were too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter; still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needful to each other, or more united. But—a hacking cough—a hectic cheek—a wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower: henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was—so thought he, as many do—his best refuge, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... too much for his enfeebled body? Had they found him only to lose him at once for ever? Sir Thomas and his wife approached the bed with beating hearts. No; there was life still; the lips moved, and the hectic of the fever returned to the cheeks. Then the eyes opened wide, and Frank sprang ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... those tables of mixed tints of which artist-authors are so fond, and tell us whether they always bear scrutiny—surely not. Admirable, perfect as these tints may be in an artistic sense, how often is their beauty like the hectic flush of consumption, which carries with it the seeds of a certain death. Will that orange where Indian yellow figures ever see old age, or that green with indigo, or purple with cochineal lake? Will they not rather spread over the ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... long and earnestly together; Stephen hesitatingly proposing this and that plan, Elfride modifying them, with quick breathings, and hectic flush, and unnaturally bright eyes. It was two o'clock before an arrangement ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... beside her, and a white shawl wrapped about her thin shoulders. Her long yellow braids of hair—how Anne had envied those beautiful braids in old schooldays!—lay on either side of her. She had taken the pins out—they made her head ache, she said. The hectic flush was gone for the time, leaving her ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was on the staircase, bringing Laura's boots. The maid of all work was leaning out of the window on the landing, brushing Laura's skirt. A tall girl was standing by the table in the sitting-room. She had a lean, hectic face, and prominent blue eyes under masses of light hair. She was Addy Ranger, the type-writer on the ground-floor, who had come up from her typewriting to see what she could do. She was sewing buttons on Laura's blouse while Jane brought pressure ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... a little. When you first knew Brenton, he was a bit uncommon, the ordinary product of Calvinism flavoured with something vastly more hectic. That was inside him, that hectic splash in his blood; it made him imaginative, greedy of new ideas, greedy to prove that they were good. Moreover, he had been trained to believe that an irate Deity of unstable ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... who stood before her, or rather—as she afterwards thought, in recalling the interview—the body of Richard Hilton, possessed by an evil spirit. His cheeks burned with a more than hectic red, his eyes were wild and bloodshot, and though the recognition had suddenly sobered him, an impatient, reckless devil seemed to lurk under the set mask ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... followed by the sharp report of a pistol. With a snap of his wrist Deacon beveled his oar, which bit cleanly into the water and pulled. There followed an interval of hectic stroking, oars in and out of the water as fast as could be done, while spray rose in clouds and the coxswain screamed the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... fact that he was not permitted to linger in Manila. Instead, he was at once ordered up-country, where at a one-troop post he administered the affairs of a somewhat hectic province, and under the guidance of the local constabulary chased will-o'-the-wisp brigands. On a shelf in his quarters he placed the silver loving-cup, and at night, when the village slept, he would sit facing it, filling one pipe after another, and ...
— The Lost Road • Richard Harding Davis
... at Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative production. When we consider what she achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail and hectic body succumbed under so excessive ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... justly disliked by society; so the woman Muspratt, culpable as she was, was safe from me. But what of the man Hawk? There no such considerations swayed me. I would interview the man Hawk. I would give him the most hectic ten minutes of his career. I would say things to him the recollection of which would make him start up shrieking in his bed in the small hours of the night. I would arise, and be a man and slay him—take him grossly, ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... that an excuse for stopping in the house over his books. He would saunter out on the sunny side of the house in a manner that the squire considered as both indolent and unmanly. Yet if there was a prospect of his leaving home, which he did pretty often about this time, he was seized with a hectic energy: the clouds in the sky, the easterly wind, the dampness of the air, were nothing to him then; and as the squire did not know the real secret cause of this anxiety to be gone, he took it into his head that it arose from Osborne's dislike to Hamley and to the ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... radiance of that bright Abominable in loss would have been insufferable; he could not have borne it; he could never have surrendered her. Moreover, a happy present effect was the result. He conjured up the anticipated chatter and shrug of the world so vividly that her beauty grew hectic with the stain, bereft of its formidable magnetism. He could meet her calmly; he had steeled himself. Purity in women was his principal stipulation, and a woman puffed at, was not the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inclinations. It was not sleep,—it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour. Pisani missed something,—what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,—the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar. He rose,—he left his bed, he leisurely put ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... any breakfast-table where a morning paper was taken that day; hardly anything for many breakfasts to follow. In homes containing boys who had actually studied Greek under the mysterious Professor Nicolovius at Mimer's School, discussion grew almost hectic; while at Mrs. Paynter's, where everybody was virtually a leading actor in the moving drama, the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... conversation she soon forgot the unfortunate girl, who as soon as Julia had gone, threw herself upon a couch, and gave way to her cheerless thoughts; her eyes were closed, but ever and anon a large tear burst through the closed lids and rolled down the wasted cheeks, which already the hectic flush, so fatally significant, had dyed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... prince, if I can only meet With wonder these tumultuous ecstacies. Not thus I looked to find Don Philip's son. A hectic red burns on your pallid cheek, And your lips quiver with a feverish heat. What must I think, dear prince? No more I see The youth of lion heart, to whom I come The envoy of a brave and suffering people. For now I stand not here as Roderigo— Not as the playmate ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... of Heaven, Foy," interrupted Adrian, "stop crushing my fingers and shaking me as though I were a rat. You mean it kindly, I know, but—" and Adrian dropped back upon the pillow, coughed and looked hectic ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... Jason said resignedly after a hectic search of the caroj and the surrounding plain. The water-of-power had vanished with Snarbi who, afraid as he was of the steam engine, apparently knew enough from observing Jason fueling the thing that it could not move without the vital liquid. An empty ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... her hands and looked into her beautiful face. To-morrow he would send the letter. To-morrow? Why, yes, to-day, like all to-days in the removed and placid light of all to-morrows, would be shown needlessly hectic. Ten to one something would have happened in the night to make to-day look foolish. If nothing had happened, if it still was war, it could only be a swiftly over business, a rapid and general recognition of the impossibility ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... more active vice; for whether mounds and fences are suddenly destroyed by a sweeping torrent, or worn away through gradual neglect, the effect is equally destructive. As a rapid fever and a consuming hectic are alike fatal to our natural health, so are flagrant immorality and torpid ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... other such banquets, was that no one could help perceiving how much less the bridegroom was the hero of the day to the tenants than was the hectic young man who presided over the feast, and how all the speeches, however they began in honour of Captain Evelyn, always turned into wistful good auguries for the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... deftly, and Douglass quite lost sight of the fact that the breakfast-room was high in a tower-like hotel, for Helen's long engagement in the city had enabled her to make herself exceedingly comfortable even amid the hectic color and insistent gilt of the Hotel Embric. The apartment not only received the sun, a royal privilege in New York, but it was gay with flowers, both potted and in vases, and the walls were decorated ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... had the air of conducting the case for the defendant. As he talked he became more and more animated and voluble. The light went out in his tobacco pipe, and a hectic spot appeared in either thin and sallow cheek. Mainwaring sat wondering to hear the severely peaceful Quaker preacher defending so notoriously bloody and cruel a cutthroat pirate as Capt. Jack Scarfield. The warm and innocent surroundings, the old brick ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... poison label, which she took without comment and placed upon the mantelpiece. Girdlestone gave a quick, keen glance at her as he retired. In truth he was astonished at the alteration which the last few days had made in her appearance. Her cheeks were colourless and sunken, save for the single hectic spot, which announced the fever within. Her eyes were unnaturally bright. A strange and new expression had settled upon her whole countenance. It seemed to Girdlestone that there was every chance that his story might become ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... highest motives. We do not take him so seriously: we are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever. His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation in the Fred Villiers duel at Boulogne,—how ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... affairs, says the Socialist, is chaotic or indifferent to a sea of wretchedness and failure, in health, vigour, order and beauty. Such pleasure as it permits is a gaudy indulgence filched from children and duty; such beauty—a hectic beauty stained with injustice; such happiness—a happiness that can only continue so long as it remains blind or indifferent to a sea of wretchedness and failure. Our present system of isolated and unsupported ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... harboured in a hovel that would hardly serve for a dog's kennel in England, baited by a rude peasant-boy, and dependent on the faith of a mercenary ruffian, but I cannot even have time to muse over my own mishap, but must come aloft, frisk, fidget, and make speeches, to please this pale hectic phantom, because she has gentle blood in her veins? By mine honour, setting prejudice aside, the mill-wench is the more attractive of the two—But patienza, Piercie Shafton; thou must not lose thy well-earned claim to be accounted a devout servant of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... the glow of this appears elsewhere in the poems, which are, without exception, religious. They have not a little of the "hectic" tone, which marks still more strongly the chief English Roman Catholic poet of the next century, Crashaw; but are never, as Crashaw sometimes is, hysterical. On the whole, as was remarked in a former chapter, they belong rather to the pre-Spenserian class in diction and metre, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... well known, and sitting among a lot of music students and excitable old maids. Only the desperately zealous or the morbidly curious would endure two hours in those wooden chairs, and he sat in the front row of this hectic body, somehow made a party to a transaction for which he had the ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather
... rubies; nor looked stern-white like Media's pearls; but cast a green and yellow glare; rays from emeralds, crossing rays from many a topaz. In those beams, so sinister, all present looked cadaverous: Abrazza's cheek alone beamed bright, but hectic. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... "Hectic, hectic! dear me, dear me!" murmured Aunt Myra, as the shadow of her gloomy bonnet fell upon Rose, and the stiff tips of a black glove touched the cheek where the colour deepened ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... went her way. It was an inclement night; the southeast wind drove the mingled snow and rain into her thinly sheltered bosom; her satin slippers were wet through and through, as she trod the muddy sidewalks. The next day a cold; soon, a settled cough; anon, a hectic cheek, a wasted form, that sat beside the harpsichord, and filled the house with music! Music in which a strain of the heavenly choristers was echoed! Oh; joy! For Alice had borne her last humiliation! Oh, greater joy! For ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... due course on the meadow of La Biesse, by the side of the blue Loire, the evil soul of Gilles de Retz went to its own place with all the paraphernalia of repentance and in the full odour of a somewhat hectic sanctity. ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... triple chin,—all stereotyped by novel-writers from the immortal Cervantes to the immortal Walter Scott. Are they not all boastful of their cookery? have they not all "whatever you please to order"? and do not all end by giving you the same hectic chicken, and vegetables cooked with rank butter? They all boast of their fine wines, and all make you drink the wine of ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... of the painful facts of experience, which are said to tell so different a tale? This,—that the physical value of education is in no way so clearly demonstrated as by these very facts. We know what is the traditional picture of the scholar,—pale, stooping, hectic, hurrying with unsteady feet to a predestined early grave; or else morbid, dyspeptic, cadaverous, putting into his works the dark tints of his own inward nature. At best, he is painted as a mere bookworm, bleached ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... sitting in the porch of the village church, and the milk-maids, returning from the fields, would now and then overhear her singing some plaintive ditty in the hawthorn walk. She became fervent in her devotions at church, and as the old people saw her approach, so wasted away, yet with a hectic gloom and that hallowed air which melancholy diffuses round the form, they would make way for her as for something spiritual, and looking after her, would shake their heads ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... to smile; but, oh me! how she looked! Her eyes had no more expression than a China-aster, and her face was so deadly pale, it made the rouge she had put on look like the hectic of a dying consumption. Her ugly was out in full bloom, I tell you. 'Dear cousin Sam,' said she, 'I am so fatigued with my labours as presidentess of this institution, that I can hardly keep my peepers open. I think, if I recollect—for I am ashamed to say I was a noddin'—that you proposed (that ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... etc.," remaining. But Knowles had more than intimated that none remained. The pictures of the horses and the ladies in Egbert's room at Sarah Macomber's confirmed the captain's belief that the Phillips past had been a hectic one. It seemed queer that, out of the ruin, there should have been preserved at least two thousand dollars in good American—yes, City ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... shimmering in their fantastic finery—the ladies Laura and Lina, my old friends Leonardo and Leonello, and the ineffable Fiammetta di Foscone. The visitors' cheeks seemed hectic from the excitement of the hour; but her face was flushed, her eyes shone, for her own reasons. As I approached her my heartbeats suffocated me. Yes, I would have taken Antonio's place and shouldered all ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... were a hectic red, and her eyes were shining when he held her roughened hands in his and thanked her for being such a good neighbor. Her narrow chest was working, and a reflection of hidden beauty rested upon her. Pelle had taught her blood to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... country, I believe. This expression she has naturally—and something more than this. In short, I cannot describe the effect of this kind of eye—at least upon me. Her features are regular, and rather aquiline—mouth small—skin clear and soft, with a kind of hectic colour—forehead remarkably good; her hair is of the dark gloss, curl, and colour of Lady J——'s; her figure is light and pretty, and she is a famous songstress—scientifically so; her natural voice (in conversation, I mean,) is very sweet; and the naivete of the Venetian ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... to be going against you, get up a hectic cough, which is easily imitated, and look acutely miserable, which you will ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... autumn morning. The early sunshine fell on the hectic flush of decay in the foliage of the woods, but a thin wisp of vapour still lingered across the moat-house garden and the quiet fields beyond. Merrington kept on until he reached the large windows of the dining-room, which opened on ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... and tongue: Pathological indications manifested by the mouth are principally displayed by the lips, which are clear red in healthy people, while a hectic red indicates fever and pulmonary disease. Pale lips indicate anaemia and chlorosis, and lips of a bluish hue are signs of a generally weakened organism. Frequent, vivid contractions of the lips (usually thin in this case) indicate ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... once, he says, by my eyes and my figure and my hair. He is not long up from Cape Colony: came out from London through chest-trouble, to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp" (do you hear hectic, coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid joke?). "And if I'll only be engaged to him, he promises to get rich, become as big a swell on the Rand as Marks or Du Taine—isn't that funny, his not knowing Du Taine is my father?—and drive me to race-meetings on a first-class ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... writers who were young just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested incident. We lose by the slow realization ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... dropped the quarter in an envelop and was stickin' it on the end of the broken branch, when the front door opens, and out dashes this tall gink with the rusty Vandyke and the hectic face. Yep, it's a lurid map, all right. Some of it might have been from goin' without a hat in the wind and weather, for his forehead and bald spot are just as high-colored as the rest; but there's a lot of temper tint, too, lightin' up the tan, and the deep furrows between the eyes ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... of curiosity in the admiration accorded to Violet. Hers was not the plain appealing of Olive's Greek statue-like beauty; it was rather the hectic erethism of painters and sculptors in a period preceding the apogee of an art. She was a statuette in biscuit after a design by Andrea Mantegna. But the traces of this exquisite atavism were now almost concealed in the supreme ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... Clifford and little Ned now appeared, the latter joining in the eager quest for dry sticks. Not far away was a large tree that for several years had been slowly dying, its few living branches having flushed early in September, in their last glow, which had been premature and hectic. Dry sticks would make little impression on the sap that now in the warmer light dropped faster from the wounded maples, and therefore to supply the intense heat that should give them at least a rich syrup before night, Webb threw off his coat and attacked the defunct veteran ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... as hectic, worried him in short. He talked of this and that but watched her close. Tea over, he endeavoured to extort The cause of her excitement. She arose And stood beside him, trying to compose Herself, all ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... the gland. This disease is called the scrophula. If these glands suppurate externally, they gradually heal, as those of the neck; if they suppurate without an opening on the external habit, as the mesenteric glands, a hectic fever ensues, which destroys the patient; if they suppurate in the lungs, a pulmonary consumption ensues, which is believed thus to differ from that described in the preceding Section, in respect to its ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... hoarsely, unaware of what they were crying out, and women for once clapped to make a noise, and split their gloves. A youth, his hair disordered and a hectic flush in his cheeks, rushed straight for the stage, crying, "Who ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain |
