"Hothouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little scarlet berries of this plant render it, when well grown, one of the prettiest of ornaments for the hothouse, conservatory, or even for a warm room. It is quite easily managed, stray seeds of it even growing where they fall, and making handsome specimens. For indoor decoration few subjects are more interesting, and a few plants may be so managed ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... could not describe Tayne Abbey; it was a dark, picturesque, massive building; the tall towers were covered with ivy, the large windows were wreathed with flowers of every hue. In some parts of sweet, sunny Kent the flowers grow as though they were in a huge hothouse; they did so at Tayne Abbey, for the front stood to the west, and there were years when it seemed to ...
— My Mother's Rival - Everyday Life Library No. 4 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... A Hothouse where some roses blew, And, whilst the outer world was white, The gentle roses softly grew ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... the western hills; and even the hothouse flowers closed up their buds—as if they were eyelids weighed down by slumber, and not to wake until the morning should arouse them again to welcome the return of their ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... visits,—one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. They helped wonderfully in shortening the long, tedious days for Jules. True, Madame Greville came often with broths and jellies, Cousin Kate made flying visits to leave rare hothouse grapes and big bunches of violets; Clotilde hung over him with motherly tenderness, and his uncle looked into the room many times a day to see that ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... item of household expenditure, and scanty would have been the supply it would have furnished; as it was we had a profusion of fruit of all kinds, from the humble gooseberry and currant to the finest peaches, nectarines, and hothouse grapes, as well as an abundant supply of walnuts ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... all its hothouse garden of women the Hotel Bon Ton boasted a broken finger nail or that little brash place along the forefinger that tattles so of potato peeling ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... exchange as existed took place exclusively under the form of barter. In place of this, we find now something more than the beginnings of a national-market and distinct traces of that of a world-market. In the towns the change was even still more marked. Here we have a sudden and hothouse-like development of the influence of money. The guild-system, originally designed for associations of craftsmen, for which the chief object was the man and the work, and not the mere acquirement of profit, was changing its character. The guilds were ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... Doubtless, in quiet and secluded nooks, there were many human wild flowers that had not lost their primitive freshness and delicacy, but they did not flourish in the withering atmosphere of the great world. The type in vogue savored of the hothouse. With its striking beauty of form and tropical richness of color, it had no sweetness, no fragrance. Many of these women we can only consider on the worldly and intellectual side. Sydney Smith has aptly characterized them as "women who violated the common duties of ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... than done; the door into the conservatory was opened, and Meta, cutting sprays of beautiful geranium, delicious heliotrope, fragrant calycanthus, deep blue tree violet, and exquisite hothouse ferns; perfect wonders to Norman, who, at each addition to the bouquet, exclaimed by turns, "Oh, thank you!" and, "How she will ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... before long, resulted in a discovery; he, who was so weary of the cultivated hothouse species of femininity, had chanced quite by accident upon a rare, unclassified wild-flower, that piqued his curiosity and enlisted his interest. For two months he had depended almost entirely upon his young ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the mountains remind you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of Montecito, among the vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air, would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be surprised? It is a far cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... light at a summer breakfast. Garden flowers are all the rage, either one kind or several kinds mixed. Coreopsis, mignonette, featherfew, nasturtiums, lilies, sweet peas, geraniums, all the simple garden flowers are used now in place of the hothouse products. ...
— Breakfasts and Teas - Novel Suggestions for Social Occasions • Paul Pierce
... the prairies of Nebraska. She wore a tailor-made suit of dark material, a sailor hat, tan gloves with big welts on the back and stout, low-heeled Oxfords. This was the young woman who had come five thousand miles to improve her health! This was the child of the Orient, and in the Orient, woman is a hothouse flower. This was the timid young recluse to whom the soft-spoken diplomats were to carry a few roses about once ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... kept Mrs. Branston very well informed as to John Saltram's progress, and that impetuous little woman had sent a ponderous retainer of the footman species to the Temple daily, laden now with hothouse grapes, and anon with dainty jellies, clear turtle-soups, or delicate preparations of chicken, blancmanges and iced drinks; the conveyance whereof was a sore grievance to the ponderous domestic, in spite of all the aid to be derived from a liberal ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... isn't so strange in my case as in any other; for you know I was always a hothouse flower. You took me away to Paris and had me trained regardless of expense, and with your money it was easy to get ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... his daughter had inherited something of this that had lain dormant all the while. For truly, the wholesome, hardy qualities brought out in others through simple human association had had little chance to germinate in her hothouse existence ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... box, but obovate (larger at the tip than at the stalk), and racemes of little white flowers of a delicious honey-scent. {118a} It ought to be, if it be not yet, introduced into England, as a charming addition to the winter hothouse. As for the other plant, would that it could be introduced likewise, or rather that, if introduced, it would flower in a house; for it is a glorious climber, second only to that which poor Dr. Krueger calls 'the ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... inundation started. For more than a month the canals were full, and the fields were flooded and a thin coat of fine pulverized soil was spread over the ground like a carpet and when seed was placed in the ground it grew like in a hothouse. At Cairo the Nile would ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... Torpenhow, not in the least with reference to past clowning. 'It would let you focus things at their proper worth and prevent your becoming slack in this hothouse of a town. Indeed it would, old man. I shouldn't have spoken if I hadn't thought so. Only, you make ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... growth of English novel-writing and its healthy development, accompanied, it may be, by many fungus-growths due to over-fertility, afford us the spectacle of a contemporary yet spontaneous English art, unforced by hothouse cultivation, uninfluenced by theories. A century or so hence the hearty, unconscious bloom of narrative literature in our day and language may seem as strange as seems to us the spontaneous blossoming of Venetian painting, of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Robert's intentions were—not of the best, and straightway the blushing rose becomes a frigid icicle. Well, this Northern icicle was not to be melted, and Sir Robert was for trying the effect of a Surrey hothouse. In her brother's absence he had the maid abducted and carried to a ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... their relief that a young wife was no restraint upon their pleasures; was indeed an addition to them. No sport was too rough for her to share, no riding too hard, no gambling too heavy. Despite her town breeding, this was no hothouse plant, this daughter of a horse-racing, whisky-drinking, card-playing gentry. Kildare took a vast delight in her prowess, particularly at the card-table; swearing joyously when she won, paying her losses, which were considerable, with an amused indifference equal to her own. One quality, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... see it, Signor Dottore. Perhaps you were not in the theatre that night. If you had been you would have seen it fast enough. The way she went on, when the Marchese Ludovico was a-giving her a lovely nosegay of flowers—hothouse flowers, if you please—as big pretty near as this table; not just a-throwing them on to the stage the way I've seen 'em do it many a time at the Fenice; but putting them into her hand; and she, the minx a ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... only outside but inside, for the arrival of the English family were going on with vigor. Pretty suites of rooms were being put into their best holiday dress for the visitors. Huge fires blazed merrily all over the house. Hothouse flowers were in profusion; hothouse fruit graced the table. The great hall quite shone with firelight and the gleam of dark old oak. Mrs. O'Shanaghgan dressed herself in her most regal black velvet dress for this auspicious occasion; and Nora, Molly, ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... thought never once entered my head. The cause of this I suppose to be, that (I do not remember it at least) I never once in my whole life turned back in fear of the weather. Prudence is a plant, of which I no doubt possess some valuable specimens, but they are always in my hothouse, never out of the glasses, and least of all things would endure the climate of the mountains. In simple earnestness, I never find myself alone, within the embracement of rocks and hills, a traveller up an alpine road, but my spirit ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... rowing in my time) I prefer the straight-forward conduct of any passing rag-and-bone merchant to the tricks of the high and mighty champions of the amateur qualification in whose nostrils the mere name of professional oarsman seems to stink. These pampered denizens of the amateur hothouse would, doubtless, wear a kid-glove before they ventured to shake hands with one who, like myself, despises ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... inventory of the articles which he required. His funds at Quebec were rather low, but the communication which his agent had made to him of Mr D. Campbell's intention of paying for the green-house and hothouse plants, made him feel very easy on that score; and he now determined to procure a small flock of sheep, and one or two of the Canadian ponies or galloways, as they would soon be required for the farm, as well as two carts or light waggons ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... was run from Chazy Junction to Bob West's former storage shed and a telephone gang came along and placed a private wire, with long-distance connections, in the new newspaper office. The office itself became transformed—"as full o' winders as a hothouse!" exclaimed Peggy McNutt, with bulging eyes—and neat partitions were placed for the offices. There was no longer any secret as to the plans of the "nabobs"; it was generally understood that those ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... pulp from which the Pimos and Papagos Indians prepare an excellent preserve; and they also use the ripe fruit as an article of food, gathering it by means of a forked stick attached to a long pole. The Cereuses include some of our most interesting and beautiful hothouse plants. In the allied genus Echinocereus, with 25 to 30 species in North and South America, the stems are short, branched or simple, divided into few or many ridges all armed with sharp, formidable spines. E. pectinatus ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... I know why it is so. The secret connection with the reservoir has been tampered with. There must be the secret contact with Jesus cultivated habitually if there is to be a sweet, strong outer life. And not cultivated by hothouse methods. Such plants won't stand the chilly air outside the glass-house. Cultivated by natural, simple contact with Jesus, over His Word, habitually, until everything comes under the ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... Tuberose and Meadowsweet, by Mr. Mark Andre Raffalovich. This is really a remarkable little volume, and contains many strange and beautiful poems. To say of these poems that they are unhealthy and bring with them the heavy odours of the hothouse is to point out neither their defect nor their merit, but their quality merely. And though Mr. Raffalovich is not a wonderful poet, still he is a subtle artist in poetry. Indeed, in his way he is a boyish master of curious music and of fantastic rhyme, and can strike on the lute of language ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... school only the most advanced class did well. Practically none of the not-yet-maturing boys survived and few of the almost mature. In other words, the high school course was fitted to only one of the three classes of boys turned out of the grammar schools. The others succumbed like hothouse azaleas at Christmas time, forced beyond their season. Physiological age, not calendar years or grammar school months, should determine the studies and the companions of children after the tenth year. Physiological strength and vitality, ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... that the experiments with the weaker solutions ought to be tried after several days of very warm weather. Those with the weakest solutions should be made on plants which have been kept for a considerable time in a warm greenhouse, or cool hothouse; but this is by no means necessary for trials with ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... few degrees and you die. But you travel through space safely, with a freezing ocean of ether about you. You travel in company with suns that throw out endless billions of degrees of heat. You are protected in a travelling hothouse, regulated exactly to suit your feeble strength and all your ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... sitting before her bedroom fire writing. It has a magic of its own—the bedroom fire. Not such a one as night by night warms hothouse bedrooms of the rich, but that which burns but once or twice a year. How the coals glow between the bars, how the red light shimmers on the black-lead bricks, how the posset steams upon the hob! Milk or tea, cocoa or coffee, poor commonplace liquids, are they not transmuted ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... the island of Oahu may be, I soon found that I could not live there. Even in winter it was like living in a hothouse. The air was steamy with heat, and frightfully relaxing. At intervals my nose streamed with blood, and I grew sensibly thinner. Then I suffered terribly from the musquitoes; my ankles were quite swollen with their bites, and in a day or two more I should have ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... remarked. "Providence appears to have designed the preservation in this vast and mysterious hothouse of antediluvian plants, to prove the sagacity of learned men in figuring them so ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... picturesque hall I have before described to you. It looked more picture-like and dreamy than ever. The piano was on the flat stairway just below the broad central landing. It was a grand piano, standing end outward, and perfectly banked up among hothouse flowers, so that only its gilded top was visible. Sir George Smart presided. The choicest of the elite were there. Ladies in demi-toilet and bonneted. Miss Greenfield stood among the singers on the staircase, and excited a sympathetic murmur among the audience. She is not handsome, ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... respecting customs which he believed to prevail in England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he had heard, nor yet the assertion, in answer to another question, that English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... The hothouse atmosphere of Padang is gladly exchanged for the freshness of the mountain heights, approached by a cog-wheel railway, and affording truer pictures of Sumatran life than the hybrid port of the steaming Lowlands. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... unavoidable contact of people in the crowd. There was a faint smell of violets about her clothes, and he snuffed up the delicate odour eagerly. Mrs. Cream had smelt strongly of perfume, an overpowering hothouse-smelling perfume that had made him feel as if he were stifling, but this delicate odour pleased him. How natural, how very obvious even, that Eleanor should use the ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... devotion. Too late she realized that all sacrifices are wasted unless the ennobling of the sacrificer's character be considered. For true happiness, true content and goodness can not be given. They must be self-won, or they are no more than hothouse plants which shrivel together in the cold blast of an east wind. Lois had sacrificed herself to bring true happiness and content and goodness into Travers' life, and had failed. She had failed all the more signally because she had never loved him. She had loved Stafford—extraordinary and ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... a hothouse from a keen winter walk, our arrival at the beautiful but nerveless city after my life amongst ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... magnificent flight of the great stair—there are properly eleven flights, divided by as many spacious and handsomely balustraded landing-places, each flight consisting of twelve steps, and all of white marble—with its southern exposure has almost the temperature of a hothouse. There are two or three beggars basking in the sunshine near the bottom of the steps. But our models do not consort with these. Not only are they not beggars, but they belong to a different caste and a different ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... the Hothouse few flowers are to be seen in January. The most noticeable of these is the Common Turnleaf or Resolution Plant, a sort of Neverlasting Flower. The Turnleaf abounds during the early days of January, but ...
— Cupid's Almanac and Guide to Hearticulture for This Year and Next • John Cecil Clay
... his exotic plants he built adjoining the upper garden a considerable conservatory or hothouse. In this he placed many of the plants sent to him as presents and also purchased many others from the collection of the celebrated botanist, John Bartram, at Philadelphia. The structure, together with the servants' quarters adjoining, was burned down in December, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... lady's health. She thought that she was, perhaps, getting better, though, as the doctor had told her, the reassuring symptoms might too probably only be too fallacious. She could eat nothing,—literally nothing. A few grapes out of the hothouse had supported her for the last week. This statement was foolish on Lizzie's part, as Mr. Emilius was a man of an inquiring nature, and there was not a grape in the garden. Her only delight was in reading and in her child's society. Sometimes ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... to be a great day for some of the waiters and a hard day on some of the cooks. Persons who happen to be near by when I am wrestling with my first ear of green corn will think I am playing on a mouth organ. My behaviour in regard to hothouse asparagus will be reminiscent of the best work of the late Bosco. In the matter of cantaloupes I rather fancy I shall consume the first two on the half shell, or au naturel, as we veteran correspondents say; but the third one will contain about as much ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... find the ordinary woodland commonplace. The narrowest and deepest gorge is hundreds of feet deep in the shale. East Row Beck drops into this canyon in the form of a waterfall at the upper end, and then almost disappears among the enormous rocks strewn along its circumscribed course. The humid, hothouse atmosphere down here encourages the growth of many of the rarer mosses, which entirely cover all but the ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... could picture the old Metropolitan on a Caruso night. I could see the Golden Horse-Shoe and the geranium-red trimmings and the satiny white backs of the women, and smell that luxurious heavy smell of warm air and hothouse flowers and Paris perfumery and happy human bodies and hear the whisper of silk along the crimson stairways. I could see the lights go down, in a sort of sigh, before the overture began, and the scared-looking blotches of white on the musicians' scores ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... in the corner of the hothouse, or, in the absence of that, in a warm, dry cellar. The first of October is the best time. Make the bed four feet wide, and as long as you require. It should be one foot high perpendicularly at the edges, and sloping toward the middle; it should be of horse-manure, well forked, ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... of tripe has been found to be, in the boiling, seven-eights of a fifth more than the loss upon a pound of any other animal substance whatever. Tripe is more expensive, properly understood, than the hothouse pine-apple. Taking into account the number of animals slaughtered yearly within the bills of mortality alone; and forming a low estimate of the quantity of tripe which the carcases of those animals, reasonably well butchered, would yield; I find that the waste on that amount of tripe, if boiled, ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... the appearance of luxuriant cultivation. Few artificial pastures could equal the natural beds of oleander that are sometimes found here stretching far away till lost behind the crags of a ravine; and which, in their unconstrained vegetation, show colours that the hothouse might envy. And particularly are the wildernesses of myrtle remarkable, which for miles grow in thick jungle, through which it is difficult to preserve the narrow track kept for passage. It is curious to pass through these odorous thickets, where you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... Maria in her fancies," snapped Mrs. Butler. "There's nothing ails her throat, only she will wrap herself in so much wool that she makes herself quite delicate. I tell her she fancies she is a hothouse plant." ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... and Christmas Day was much enlivened by last rehearsals, the panics of timid actors, the scramble for forgotten properties, and the decoration of the theatre. Evergreen and holly from the woods, blooming plants from the hothouse on Parnassus, and flags of all nations made it very gay that night in honour of the guests who were coming, chief among them, Miss Cameron, who kept her promise faithfully. The orchestra tuned their instruments with unusual care, the scene-shifters ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... could have had for the asking; but none was, in his own phraseology, "just the right thing." He wanted something unusual, and yet not exotic—something obvious, which no one else had observed—something cultivated, and yet native—something as exquisite as any hothouse orchid, but with the keen, fresh scent of the American woods and waters on its bloom. It was not a thing to be picked up every day, and so he kept on the lookout for it, and waited. Even when he found it, he was not certain, ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... between glimpses of shore and shore, or until they sailed for a time along some wild and beautiful tropic coast. Then Chris would lean on the side of the ship looking at the mountainous or jungled shore. A scent such as comes from the opened door of a hothouse would drift out to sea to the sailors, who looked yearningly toward the land and the greenness. A warm breath of flowers, damp moss, and leaves in the sun would mingle with the rough salt smell of the sea. Chris and Amos imagined to themselves what ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... splendour upon the night after her return from Winchester. Through the narrow opening between the folding-doors she had seen the pictures and the statues glimmering in the lamplight of the inner hall. She had seen in that brief moment a bright confusion of hothouse flowers, and trailing satin curtains, gilded mouldings, and frescoed panels, the first few shallow steps of a marble staircase, the filigree-work of ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... circus-tunes, 'way in some other room Jes' chokin' full o' hothouse plants and pinies and perfume; And fountains, squirtin' stiddy all the time; and statutes, made Out o' puore marble, 'peared-like, sneakin' round ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... well, many varieties bear heavily, and some produce fruit of exceptional merit. I have seen as fine nectarines grown in the Stanthorpe district as I have met with in any part of Australia or America, fruit of large size and the highest flavour, that compared favourably with the finest hothouse-grown fruit of the ...
— Fruits of Queensland • Albert Benson
... for the embellishment of the mansion, it was a fair subject for damages, and the jury of reference gave its proprietor the pretty verdict of eleven thousand pounds. At the table we had the finest dessert which the hothouse can furnish. Our host gave us a very interesting account of his travels in America more than forty years ago. A journey from New York to Niagara, as related by this traveller, was then far more of an undertaking than a journey from New Orleans to New York, ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... midst, listening to their talk, their tales, their jests, and their laughter, the unseen mantle fell upon Naomi at last, which made her a woman who had hitherto been a child. In this hothouse of sickly odours these women lived together, having no occupation but that of eating and drinking and sleeping, no education but devising new means of pleasing the lust of their husband's eye, no delight than that of supplanting one another ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... of the park went out, but the moon shone on, lustrous and splendid. First he reviewed his odd adventure in the archbishop's gardens. He had spoken to princesses before, but they were women of the world, hothouse roses that bloom and wither in a short space. The atmosphere which surrounded this princess was idyllic, pastoral. She had seen nothing of the world, its sports and pastimes, and the art of playing at love was unknown to her. Again he could ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... day; be very careful not to over-stimulate its intelligence, over-excite its imagination, or over-strain its mental powers. After the age of ten the great danger is over; up to that time it is the health of the body which requires care; not fuss, not rearing like a hothouse plant, but the healthy training that may ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... Mr. Bush confined himself to affable conversation, to sundry gifts of hothouse flowers, and only allowed his feelings outlet in certain telltale glances when he thought she could not see. Hazel felt disinclined to fly from what was at worst ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... to have a nicer luncheon for you, Patty," said her aunt, as they sat down at the table, "but the cook forgot to order lobsters, and when I telephoned for fresh peas the grocer said I was too late, for they were all sold. I'm so sorry, for I do love hothouse peas, don't you?" ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... not all play. We take a great deal of interest in our flowers, in the beauties of the hothouse, and in our trees. We give ourselves in all seriousness to horticulture, and embosom the chalet in flowers, of which we are passionately fond. Our lawns are always green, our shrubberies as well ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... Tung-chow it is said that a large army is collected under Sang-ko-lin-sin himself (their great general). I am now enjoying the life of a camp; writing to you seated on my portmanteau, with my desk on my only chair. It is perhaps better than my hothouse at Tientsin. ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... with patience and understanding. Here was laid out before her the bared heart of the "poor little rich girl." She pieced the bits together until she had the whole picture of this odd, unnatural, hothouse child—antagonistic to her parents, to her school, yet full of feeling, and coming into the age when the emotions play such havoc. No wonder she had settled her youthful affections upon Jerry. He was so preeminently the type one loves ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... amuses the masses with buffooneries to prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality, and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. Satan in all his shapes and forms as he rules the world has been described by Goethe as Egotism. Selfishness is his element and real nature. Selfishness not yet realizing the divine, because so ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... ponies. My wife does not appear to be particularly lavish and continually complains of the insufficiency of her allowance. Our table is not Lucullan, by any means; and we rarely have game out of season, hothouse fruit or many flowers. Indeed, there is an elaborate fiction maintained by my wife, cook and butler that our establishment is run economically and strictly on a business basis. Perhaps it is. I hope so. I do not know anything about it. Anyhow, here is the ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... like most of the Amazon basin, and at time of high water the rivers know no limits. Lying, as it does, so near the equator, the heat is intense and constant, oppressive even to the native. The forest-growth—and it is forest wherever it is not river—is forced as in a huge hothouse, and is so dense as to render progress through it extremely difficult. Not only are there obstructions in the way of tree trunks, underbrush, and trailing vines and creepers like ropes, but the footing is nothing more than a mat of interlaced roots. The forest is also sombre ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... lanterns, under the government of a high and mighty one. These did not cast a light like the rest, but seemed to me dimmer than any long-snuff farthing candle whose tallow has been half melted away in a hothouse. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... there would be when it was told that not from any hothouse whatever, but from the depths of the ocean ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... the propositions in your letters in regular rotation as they come; and so, with regard to the peaches, those that I have tasted on this side of the Atlantic I should say were not comparable to fine hothouse peaches in England and fine French espalier peaches; but then the peach trees here are standard trees, and there are whole orchards of them. Their chief merit, therefore, is their abundance, and some of that abundance is certainly fit for nothing but to feed pigs withal. [It is by no means a luxury ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... handsome apartment, hung round with pictures and decorated with choice hothouse flowers and evergreens, as unlike as possible anything one might expect to find ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... you hurl at a work of art and which strikes a heart behind you. A face not to be omitted surely, if ever some painter in love with things modern should conceive the idea of reproducing on canvas that perfectly typical manifestation of Parisian life, the opening of the Salon in that vast hothouse of statuary, with the yellow gravelled paths and the great glass ceiling, beneath which, half-way from the floor, the galleries of the first tier stand forth, lined with heads bending over to look, and with extemporized ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... for a boy to wait upon himself as much as possible. The more he has to depend upon his own exertions, the more manly a fellow will he become. Self-dependence will call out his energies, and bring into exercise his talents. It is not in the hothouse, but on the rugged Alpine cliffs, where the storms beat most violently, that the toughest plants grow. So it is with man. The wisest charity is to help a boy to help himself. Let him never hear any language but this: You have your own way ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... its kind, and of a unique kind. A form of French verse, which up to then had been used, since the time when Villon used it as no man has used it before or since, and almost exclusively in iambic measures, is suddenly transported from the hothouse into the open air, is stretched and moulded beyond all known limits, and becomes, it may almost be said, a new lyric form. After A Midsummer Holiday no one can contend any longer that the ballade is a structure necessarily any more artificial than the sonnet. But then in the hands ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... the way her eyes had sparkled at me through her lashes, returned to my memory, powerful as the odor of her flower. I compared her with that flower—luxurious and perfect looking, as if she had grown in a hothouse; and with that strange overwhelming characteristic which drew, in spite of all disliking. It was useless to cry, "I do not like you and I will not believe in you." There were two things I had to acknowledge—her will, and her power of seduction. Hadn't I felt the light of ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... maturity. Mothers and nurses cannot give this subject too much thought and care, since the welfare of future generations depends largely upon intestinal cleanliness, in view of the rich and racy life of our hothouse civilization. We are a people poisoned through constipation and diarrhea: two affections that derange more lives than all other pathological conditions together. Banish alimentary uncleanliness and you take most of the poisons from the human race—poisons that ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... as she walked last into the room, Anna uttered a guttural expression of delighted surprise, for it was as if every hothouse flower in Witanbury had been gathered to do honour to the white-clad, veiled figure who now stood, with downcast eyes, by ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... bear even a little fruit, the palm-trees close to the shore, even when planted on wretched soil, grow plentiful crops without the slightest trouble. Has a palm-tree ever been made to blossom in a hothouse? Thomson [56] mentions that coco-trees growing by the sea-side are wont to incline their stems over the ocean, the waters of which bear their fruit to desert shores and islands, and render them habitable for mankind. Thus the coco-tree ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... approaching vulgarity in his somewhat complex disposition, was, for a man of affairs and an American, singularly fond of the small elegances of life. Although he sat alone at dinner, the table was heaped with choice flowers and carefully selected hothouse fruit. His one glass of wine, the best of its sort, he sipped meditatively, and with the air of a connoisseur. The soft lights upon the table were such as a woman, mindful of her complexion, might have chosen. Behind his chair stood his English butler, ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... century. The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard in the land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle is hourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron is well established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens on our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation on our principal canals. The Ganges and the Mississippi have long since flooded the tawny Thames, as Juvenal's cynical friend declared the Syrian Orontes had flooded the Tiber. And what has ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... so. And yet we have had here in this little lunch, or, as you called it, a 'bite of something,' three different kinds of meat, two kinds of bread, hothouse grapes, and ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon
... of a child whose gaze was difficult to endure, and whose health was so fragile, for when only a few months old he had almost died of infantile enteritis. His parents had been obliged to carry him hastily to Switzerland, and then to Hyeres, and to keep him in an atmosphere like that of a hothouse. Petted and spoiled, tended by women, like Achilles at Scyros among the daughters of Lycomedes, would he not bear all his life the stamp of too softening an education? Too pretty and too frail, with his curls and ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... me, Dicky," he said, "and if my people haven't any cake, I can at least give you all the hothouse grapes you can eat, and some to carry home. How does that ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... eyes. Now, perhaps, she would see! And she lay, regarding him with the intense excited absorption with which one looks at a tiny wildflower through a magnifying-lens, and watches its insignificance expanded to the size and importance of a hothouse bloom. In her mind was this thought: He is looking at me with his real self, since he has no reason for armour against me now. At first his eyes seemed masked with their customary brightness, his whole face with its usual decorous formality; then gradually he became so ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... sweetly vivacious. When he had looked at it for a longish time he nodded and smiled, as if the pictured lips had actually spoken to him. There was a tumbler standing beside the photograph with a bunch of hothouse flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling anew at the pretty girl's portrait, he turned about again, and walked into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The strident voice of the ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... I'd got a chill," he muttered. "'Twasn't last night, though; 'twas going out this morning, coming back in the bus. Margaret keeps that housekeeper's room o' hers like a hothouse— that's what she does. 'Twas going out from there into the biting wind, that's what did for me. It must be awful to stand about in such weather; 'tis a wonder to me how that young fellow, Joe Chandler, can stand the life—being out in all weathers ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... like a wild fury, scourging and freezing, the Jardin de la Fontaine is serene and windless. The mistral goes always with a cloudless sky, as though the clouds were fleeing from its icy keenness, and the sun pours full upon the semi-circle of the Jardin de la Fontaine, turning it to a hothouse where the most delicate plants and shrubs can find ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the Grafin whispered to me. The girls talked together in undertones, which would have made me feel shy and out of it if I hadn't somehow not minded a bit, and they did look exactly what the Colonel had said they were, in their pale evening frocks,—a nosegay of very delicate and well cared-for hothouse flowers. I had on my evening frock for the first time since I left England, and after the weeks of high blouses felt conspicuously and terribly overdressed up in my bedroom and till I saw the frocks the ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... satisfaction, and followed the wide path that led through the gloom. Though he knew his way, he walked cautiously in this alley, bordered by enormous trunks, their crowns lost in shadow. He could have fancied himself in a hothouse roofed with black glass, for there were flagstones under foot, and no sky could be seen, no breeze could stir overhead. The few stars whose glimmer twinkled from afar belonged to our firmament; they quivered almost on the ground, and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... a sort of hothouse existence; for Lochlynne, you know, is the toy of a Pennsylvania coal baron, who breeds hackneys, not for profit, but for the joy there is in it; just as other men grow orchids and build cup defenders. At the ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... pork, a turkey, a pair of boiled fowls, a ham, a sucking pig, a hare, a loaf of bread, a fine Cheshire cheese, several pies, and a great variety of fruit, which was always ripe and in season, winter or summer. Rose's papa once observed that his hothouse produced none so fine; for the currants were as large as apples, and two ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... other! She felt in her fine, rhapsodic way like a young priestess before the altar, ready to touch with a live coal the lips of the gods, but withheld by a malignant power. For the first time in her life Ermentrude Adams, delicately nurtured in a social hothouse, realized in wrath ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... a highly decorated ceiling where cupids with crimson-daubed bottoms swam in all attitudes in a sea of pink-and blue-and lavender-colored clouds, wreathing themselves coyly in heavy garlands of waxy hothouse flowers, while cornucopias spilling out squashy fruits gave Andrews a feeling of distinct insecurity as ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... painted with "autumnal hectic," strewed the bier of the declining year. Beulah sat down on a tuft of moss, and gathered clusters of golden-rod and purple and white asters. She loved these wild wood-flowers much more than gaudy exotics or rare hothouse plants. They linked her with the days of her childhood, and now each graceful spray of golden-rod seemed a wand of memory calling up bygone joys, griefs, and fancies. Ah, what a hallowing glory invests our past, beckoning us back to the haunts of the olden time! The paths our childish feet ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... the Primary and Secondary epochs of geology, it is now pretty certain, hothouse conditions practically prevailed almost without a break over the whole world from pole to pole. It may be true, indeed, as Dr. Croli believes (and his reasoning on the point I confess is fairly convincing), that from time to time glacial periods in one ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... but they are all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It is a branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. There are rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem to think that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or a hothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff of beauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he was intrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of a nation. If he could not have loved ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... was on the road. The sound of the horse's feet were sharply distinct in the night. On all sides, but far off, the guard dogs were barking by the hidden homes of men. The air was warm as in a hothouse, but light and faintly impregnated with perfume shed surely by the mystical garments of night as she glided on with Domini towards the desert. From the blackness of the palms there came sometimes thin notes of the birds of night, the whizzing noise ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... around. But as the "old man"—and before he was thirty years old he was affectionately so called by his laboratory associates—he is a normal, fun-loving, typical American. His sense of humor is intense, but not of the hothouse, overdeveloped variety. One of his favorite jokes is to enter the legal department with an air of great humility and apply for a job as an inventor! Never is he so preoccupied or fretted with cares as not to drop all thought of his work for a few moments to listen to a new story, with ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... Frederick, I am not mistaken. I heard her myself when she told him so. It was in Count Schwarzenberg's hothouse; I came behind her with the ladies, and she thought I was paying no attention whatever to her and all that she was saying to Count Adolphus. But I managed to watch her constantly without attracting the attention ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... of Music came through the hothouse Palms, Walter would be out on the Waxen Floor with his ...
— Ade's Fables • George Ade
... go if you want to?" inquired Robbie Belle as she reflectively picked up her roll again. "We can invite somebody else to take your place at the table. Bea and Lila are going to the hothouse for smilax ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... exception of the Trocadero) have been cheaply imitative of Paris, with the usual appurtenances of arduous waiters, gorgeously dressed women dancing on red velvet carpets, fortissimo orchestras, expensive wines, blumenmaedl, hothouse strawberries and other accessories of manufactured pleasure. But compared with Paris these places have been second rate. The damen (I except thee, lovely Mimi!) have not inflamed us either with their beauty or with manifestations of their esprit ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... it because my pants fit much too soon, Or that my hand-me-down is out of style, That thou dost turn me under when I spoon, Nor hand me hothouse beauties with a smile? If that's the case, next week I'll scorch the line Clad in a shell I'll ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum • Wallace Irwin
... all was noise and bustle. Greta was quiet enough, and ready to set out at any time, but a bevy of gay young daleswomen were grouped about her, trying to persuade her to change her brown broche dress for a pale-blue silk, to have some hothouse plants in her hair, and at least to wear ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... hothouse peaches and amethyst bunches of grapes were brought by the footman, I knew that soon Princess Sanzanow would smile at the French duchess, and we should all troop away to leave the men. I was sure that Eagle would ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... a vase very tastefully with her varieties of leaves, and enjoyed taking in her cousin Sarah, who admired the leaves greatly while she thought they came from Mrs. Mervyn's hothouse; but when she found they were the product of her own furrows, voted them coarse, ugly, withered things, such as only the simplicity of a Londoner could bring into civilized society. So Honora stood over her gorgeous feathery bouquet, not knowing whether ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... outdoor flowers were banished to the oaken hall. Lady Mary's sense of the fitness of things permitted the silver cups and Venetian glasses of this dainty apartment to be filled only with waxen hothouse blooms and maidenhair fern. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... learned this much in New York," she said, carried on by her impetus, "that men and women are like plants. To be useful, and to grow properly, they must be firmly rooted in their own soil. This city seems to me like a luxurious, overgrown hothouse. Of course," she added hastily, "there are many people who belong here, and whose best work is done here. I was thinking about those whom it attracts. And I have seen so many who are only watered and fed and warmed, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... wants one true note of a poet of our times, and that is this: he cannot swagger it well in a tavern, nor domineer in a hothouse. John Davis?[49] ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... her mite to the fund which purchased spring flowers—hothouse-grown, for this April was a villainous prolongation of winter—with which to strew the approach to the station and fill the reserve ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... months and a half before birth of the child the father, a glazier, fell through the roof of a hothouse, severely cutting his right arm, so that he was lying in the infirmary for a long time, and it was doubtful whether the hand could be saved. The child was healthy, but on the flexor surface of the radial side of the right forearm just above the wrist—the same spot ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the qualities of hothouse beauty. Her jet black hair hung over the snowy skin of her temples in striking contrast. Her form was of a delicate slenderness and her movement easy and graceful with just a little of that languid listlessness ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... the senses and passions. The natural man was deified; but not in the manner of the Greeks, in simplicity and with a pure love of beauty. An artificial love of nature and the natural in man was the result of the renaissance; a hothouse culture and a corrupting moral development followed. Passion was given loose rein, the senses took every form of indulgence. Yet the Church was even worse, while many of the classic scholars were stoic in their moral purity and earnestness. This movement developed individualism in thought, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... arctic traveller rushing from pole to pole, at least he is often literally fleeing from ice to ice. He has to make a very extreme distinction between outdoor and indoor clothing. He has to live in an icehouse outside and a hothouse inside; so hot that he may be said to construct an icehouse inside that. He turns himself into an icehouse and warms himself against the cold until he is warm enough to eat ices. But the point is that the same coat of fur which in England would indicate the sybarite ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... all unconscious of any mighty purpose. Those at the faro tables of the market increased the stakes and opened new tables. New industrial companies sprung up overnight like mushrooms, watered and sunned by the easy optimism of the hour. The rumors of war disturbed this hothouse growth. But the "big people" took advantage of these to squeeze the "little people," and all worked to the glory of the great god. In the breast of every man on the street was seated one conviction: 'This is a mighty country, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... mother's sorrow for her in this detail but made it the more important—and she saw herself glamorous with orchids; discarded these for an armful of long-stemmed, heavy roses; tossed them away for a great bouquet of white camellias; and so wandered down a lengthening hothouse gallery of floral beauty, all costly and beyond her reach except in such a wistful day-dream. And upon her present whole horizon, though she searched it earnestly, she could discover no figure ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... graduated he came home and started an exclusive circle composed mostly of himself. He was unapproachably haughty, until one day he accompanied a proud beauty, who was visiting the Singers (our other hothouse family) to Number Eleven, and lingered too long after the train started. DeLancey got off, but in doing so he performed a variety of difficult and instructive feats of balancing on his ear which were viewed by a large audience with terrific enthusiasm. ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... nearly alike as possible. Place one in the country away from the hothouse culture and refinements of the city, with only the district school, the Sunday-school, and a few books. Remove wealth and props of every kind; and, if he has the right sort of material in him, he will thrive. Every obstacle overcome lends him strength for the next conflict. If he falls, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... literal use of the brevet of brotherhood which Lillie had bestowed on him, and talked to her as the generality of real brothers talk to their sisters, using great plainness of speech. He withered all her poor little trumpery array of hothouse flowers of sentiment, by treating them as so much garbage, as all men know they are. He set before her the gravity and dignity of marriage, and her duties to her husband. Last, and most unkind of all, he ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... chorister boy had gone straight to the grave and dropped on his knees beside it. He looked at the lovely hothouse flowers and then glanced ruefully at his own humble offering—sweetwilliam chiefly, snapdragon, stocks, and nasturtium. But he laid it there with the rest, and Angelica's heart was wrung anew as she thought of the tender pleasure this loving act of the child would have been to the Tenor. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand |
