"White tie" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... His clothes were black, his linen good. He wore a large white tie, which was the fashionable thing in that time and place. His long moustache, which was fine rather than heavy, hung down to his chin on either side of his mouth. He did not look like a man who would chance upon any strong ...
— The Zeit-Geist • Lily Dougall
... the double-bedded chamber at the Majestic, as his wife lay in bed and he was methodically folding up a creased white tie and inspecting his chin in the mirror, he felt that he was touching again, after an immeasurable interval, the rock-bottom of reality. Nellie, even when he could only see her face—and that in a mirror!—was the most real phenomenon in ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... marvellous to recount, are honestly kept. I should want no better servant in these coast-countries and in exploring the far interior. The cook, 'Mister Dawson,' of Axim, is a sturdy senior of missionary presence: having been long employed in that line, he wears a white tie on Sundays, and I shrewdly suspect him of preaching. A hard worker, beginning early and ending late, he is an excellent stuffer of birds and beasts, and the good condition of our collection is owing entirely to him. His son, Kwasi Yau (Sunday Joe), is a sharp 'boy' in the Anglo-Indian ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... he wear a white tie when he dines with friends, And tie it neat in a bow with ends, or a KNOT, The Akond ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... black and white tie, with his quiet, stealthy movements and unobtrusive attentions, would have been pronounced good style as a gentleman's gentleman in the grandest of Belgravian mansions. Had he suddenly come into a fortune, and gone into society where his antecedents were unknown, five-sixths ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various
... Metternich. All day Napoleon was in charming humor. Contrary to his usual custom he dressed for dinner, putting on a coat which his sister Pauline, an authority on fashions, had commanded of Lger, the tailor of the King of Naples, who was fond of expensive and handsome clothes. This coat and a white tie were not becoming to Napoleon; his simple uniforms and black tie suited him much better. This was the only time he wore the coat which the Princess Pauline had ordered; on ordinary occasions he appeared in the green uniform of the Chasseurs of the Guard; and on ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... seen that morning and evening dress for gentlemen varies as much as it does for ladies. It is decidedly out of place for a gentleman to wear a dress coat and white tie in the day-time, and when evening dress is desired on ceremonious occasions, the shutters should be closed and the gas or lamps lighted. The true evening costume or full dress suit, accepted as such throughout the world, has firmly established itself in ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... consist of evening dress, if he is to be married in the evening, complete with white gloves and tie, and boutonniere of the same flowers as the bride's bouquet. If married in the afternoon, or any time before six o'clock, he will wear a frock coat of black, white vest, gray trousers, and white tie and gloves. In case the wedding is in the evening and the bride is to wear her traveling dress, hat, and gloves, the bridegroom may wear the same suit as for an afternoon wedding, if ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... sparkle of white and silver and old rose. She talked what sounded like innocent commonplaces a little spiced by whim, though indeed each remark had an exploratory quality, and her soft blue eyes rested ever and again upon Billy's white tie. It seemed she did so by the merest inadvertency, but it made the young man wish he had after all borrowed a black one from Benham. But the manservant who had put his things out had put it out, and he hadn't been quite sure. Also she noted all the little things ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Thus, up to twenty-three, Keble's life had been that of a sort of acolyte, and though not ascetic (for his nature appears to have been always genial and mirthful), entirely clerical in its environments and its aspirations. At twenty-three he took orders, and put round his neck, with the white tie of Anglican priesthood, the Thirty-nine Articles, the whole contents of the Anglican Prayer Book and all the contradictions between those two standards of belief. For some time he held a tutorship in his college then he went down to a country living in the neighbourhood ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and gown, of course, being among these), "gaudeat, nisi qui in aliquod Collegium vel Aulam admissus fuerit, et intra quindenam post talem admissionem in matriculam Universitatis fuerit relatus." So our hero put on the required white tie, and then went forth to complete his ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... to heaven, and how he was liked and loved by every one in the parish; perhaps they could condone his "sin of omission" in the matter of not wearing a proper clerical black coat with a stand-up collar of Oxford cut and the regulation white tie, and that of "commission" in smoking such a vulgar thing ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... us concocted. It was business straight through. Vaucross was to rush Miss Blye with all the style and display and emotion he could for a month. Of course, that amounted to nothing as far as his ambitions were concerned. The sight of a man in a white tie and patent leather pumps pouring greenbacks through the large end of a cornucopia to purchase nutriment and heartsease for tall, willowy blondes in New York is as common a sight as blue turtles in delirium tremens. But he was to write her ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... pretty powdered faces in which the eyes looked intensely alive and black. And first Don Juste Lopez, the President of the Provincial Assembly, passed with his three lovely daughters, solemn in a black frock-coat and stiff white tie, as when directing a debate from a high tribune. Though they all raised their eyes, Antonia did not make the usual greeting gesture of a fluttered hand, and they affected not to see the two young ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... extent in this category—were in F.'s estimation the "trump cards" of the pack, with which he could "score tricks" innumerable, and so he accepted at once; and, in a very few minutes after his acceptance, made his appearance in a correct dinner-dress and a most unexceptionable white tie. ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... already in the room, and following her a short man in a suit of sombre black, wearing a white tie, and carrying a black bowler hat. He blinked across the room through his thick glasses, and Dominey knew that the end had come. The door was closed behind them. The Princess came a little further into the room. Her hand was ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the hounds met on Sir Charles's estate. Sir Charles and Lady Bassett breakfasted in Pink; he had on his scarlet coat, white tie, irreproachable buckskins, and top-boots. (It seemed a pity a speck of dirt should fall on them.) Lady Bassett was in her riding-habit; and when she mounted her pony, and went to cover by his side, with her blue-velvet cap and her red-brown hair, she looked more like a brilliant ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... have me guilty of the deadly sin of gluttony, you must agree that I have not dined. For I am going to dine this evening. I am going to dine at the Hotel Victoria at Roccadoro. I am going to dine with a lady. I am going to dine in all the pomp and circumstance of my dress-suit, with a white tie and pumps. And you yourself have said it, a Christian man may not, without guilt of gluttony, dine twice on the same day. Therefore it is the height of uncharitableness, it's a deliberate imputation of sin, to contend ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... heard is one of the strange mysteries of modern life. Their methods are as reasonable as to try to pour some precious stuff from the spring to the reservoir through a non-conducting pipe, which could by the least effort be opened. Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to the water-carafe upon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to the silver candlestick upon his right. Then he sat down, and Mr. Waldron, the famous popular lecturer, rose amid a general murmur of applause. He was a stern, gaunt man, ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unless I give you explicit directions to the contrary we always dress for dinner," said the Governor. "It's a lot more distinguished to be shot in a white tie than in a morning suit. Always keep that in mind, Archie—you who go about popping at men in their own houses with their ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... action would have been seen in his imagination as part of an age chiefly known to us through its more serious effects. Why should he be ashamed of his own agitated feeling merely because he dressed for dinner, wore a white tie, and lived among people who might laugh at his owning any conscience in the matter, as the solemn folly of taking himself too seriously?—that bugbear of circles in which the lack of grave emotion passes for wit. From such cowardice ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... bed his thoughts became more tumultuous than ever; while among all the inchoate and fragmentary sketches of this dreadful day, now rising before him, the clearest was of his uncle collapsed in a big chair with a white tie dangling from his hand; and one conviction, following upon that picture, became definite in George's mind: that his Uncle George Amberson was a hopeless dreamer from whom no help need be expected, an amiable imbecile lacking ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... My father was in his boots, his trousers, his white tie, and his dressing-gown. My mother also was half dressed. It seemed to me that the servants took greater pains in waiting on me and showed me more respect. I even remember that Marie said, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... a fellow could possibly "talk Shylock" in a white tie and an evening jacket. Oswald thought it equally ridiculous to pose as an Italian lover in English clothing; and Peggy turned up her eyes and said she could not really abandon herself to her part if her costume were inappropriate. Even Esther, the sober-minded, sided with the rest, so the ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... a figure of whom it was natural to ask who that was, it so surely looked like Somebody—though Mrs. Hawthorne had very likely asked because, merely, in her eyes he was queer. It was an oldish man, dressed with marked elegance, white tie, white waistcoat, white flower at his lapel. The whole of worldly wisdom dwelt in his weary eye. He had yellow and withered cheeks, black hair with a dash of white above the ears, and a mustache whose thickest part curved ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... quaint figure the Duke's was. When away from home he wore a wig, but not indoors, his tall hat had a broad brim, he wore a white tie and high collar, his trousers tied round his legs, were of check, with a frock coat and ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... suggested Uncle Felix. And Stumper, growling his acceptance, walked home to lunch with them in the old Mill House. In his short black coat, trousers of shepherd's plaid, and knotted white tie bearing a neat horseshoe pin, he looked smart yet soldierly. Tim apologised for his moist finger and the threepenny bit. "I thought it had got down a hole," he said, "but you found it wonderfully." "It simply flew!" cried Judy. "Clever old ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... as if his memory, before suddenly frozen up by cold charity, as suddenly thawed back into fluidity at the first kindly word. "Oh yes, oh yes, dar is aboard here a werry nice, good ge'mman wid a weed, and a ge'mman in a gray coat and white tie, what knows all about me; and a ge'mman wid a big book, too; and a yarb-doctor; and a ge'mman in a yaller west; and a ge'mman wid a brass plate; and a ge'mman in a wiolet robe; and a ge'mman as is a sodjer; ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... She looked quickly at old Perce and saw that he was in his best clothes, with a lovely new spotted blue and white tie, and a dahlia ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... yesterday morning, as I had showered the leaves from my geranium in reading Little Dombey, they mounted the platform after I was gone, and picked them all up as a keepsake." A few days earlier he had written to the same correspondent: "The papers are full of remarks upon my white tie, and describe it as being of enormous size, which is a wonderful delusion; because, as you very well know, it is a small tie. Generally, I am happy to report, the Emerald press is in favour of my appearance, and likes my eyes. But one gentleman comes out with a letter at Cork, wherein he says that ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... was dressed entirely in black, with the exception of a white tie, which gave his figure a semi-clerical appearance. His face was long and somewhat pinched, his chin and upper lip were shaven, and his snow-white, close-cropped whiskers ran in two straight lines from his jaw up to a level with his piercing, hawk-like eyes. He would probably ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... inferior genius, Victor Hugo and Mr. Gladstone, take refuge in it. Humanity is a pigsty, where liars, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate; it has been so since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end. Far better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says, "I don't care how the poor live; my only regret is that they live at all;" and he ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... Breadalbane Terrace, clad in spotless blacks, white tie, shirt, et caetera, and finished off below with a pair of navvies' boots. How true that the devil is betrayed by his feet! A message to Cummy at last. Why, O treacherous woman! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... coat and white tie, announcing the guests as they arrive through a hole such as Chickens dig at the foot of hedges.] ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... couldn't give me the right sort. Good Lord! I can see him yet: short man, rather stout and baldish. Meant well, but his religion wasn't worth a bean to me that day.... Religion is all very well to talk about on a Sunday; broadcloth coat, white tie and that sort of thing; good for funerals, too, when a man's dead and can't answer back. Sometimes I've amused myself wondering what a dead man would say to a parson, if he could sit up in his coffin and talk five minutes of what's happened to him since they called him dead. Interesting ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... husband's white tie, took him by the ears, kissed him warmly on each side of his large pink face, glowing with blushes evoked by her unwonted display of affection, and led him away to dinner, her mental vision seeing prophetic broadsheets papering the kerbs of Piccadilly, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... well-prescribed riding-dress for women as for men. The habit of dark material, with skirt falling just over the feet when in the saddle, and the close-fitting waist, with long or short tails, together with the white collar and black or white tie, constitute the regulation dress. The derby hat is smaller than formerly. Gloves of a dark color and a crop with a bone handle are always in place. Any jewelry, save that which is absolutely necessary, should ...
— The Book of Good Manners • W. C. Green
... him; the agent of the property, two small neighbouring squires, a broad-browed burly man in knickerbockers, who was apparently a clergyman, to judge from his white tie, the adjutant of the local regiment, and a couple of good-looking youths, Etonian friends of Philip. Elizabeth and Mariette came in from the garden, and a young cousin of the Gaddesdens, a Miss Lucas, slipped into ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... replied, "that's why so many men keep the title to their religious proclivities in their wife's name." He went out gayly, and the elder man heard the boyish limp almost tripping down the stairs. Ward walked to the window, straightening his white tie, and stood looking into the street at the young man shaking hands and bowing and raising his hat as he went. Ward's hair was graying at the temples, and his thin smooth face was that of a man who spends many hours considering many things, and he ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... stormy evening and already dusk. Darkness sets in as the following scene is in progress. A man-servant is lighting the chandelier; two maids bring in pots of flowers, lamps and candles, which they place on tables and stands along the walls. RUMMEL, in dress clothes, with gloves and a white tie, is standing in the room giving ...
— Pillars of Society • Henrik Ibsen
... if I did. But how strange it seems! There was he only the other day in his quiet livery and white tie valeting us, and waiting at table, and now he's climbing that tree like ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... the hearth-rug, his hands behind his back, his brows bent on me benevolently was a man in clerical attire. He looked ostentatiously, exaggeratedly clerical. His clerical frock-coat was of inordinate length; his boots were aggravatingly clump-soled; by a very large white tie, masking the edges of a turned-down collar, he proclaimed himself Evangelical. An otherwise clean-shaven florid face was adorned with brown side-whiskers growing rather long. A bald, shiny head topped a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... sort of acquiescence, and then asked me for the loan of a white tie. I should have loved to give him a bowstring instead, with somebody who knew how to operate it. He was a fluff, ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... got after him and he was about to be Shown Up for Dallying with Corporations, but he put on a fresh White Tie and made a Speech about our Heroic Dead on a Hundred Battle-Fields, and Most People said it was simply Impossible for such a Thunderous Patriot to be a Crook. So he played the Glittering ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... come slamming in here, disturbing a private wedding," announced the man in the white tie, slapping his palm upon the book ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... that from which the Squire had risen. He was a big man, with a big face, clean shaven except for a pair of abbreviated side whiskers. He had light-blue eyes and a mobile, sensitive mouth. His clothes were rather shabby, and except for a white tie under a turned-down collar, not clerical. His voice, coming from so massive a frame, seemed thin, but it was of a pleasant tenor quality, and went well with the mild and attractive expression of his face. All the parishioners of Kencote liked the Rector, though he ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... upon its issues. Fraisier left Mme. Cibot, and went to try on his new clothes. He found them waiting for him, went home, adjusted his new wig, and towards ten o'clock that morning set out in a carriage from a livery stable for the Rue de Hanovre, hoping for an audience. In his white tie, yellow gloves, and new wig, redolent of eau de Portugal, he looked something like a poisonous essence kept in a cut-glass bottle, seeming but the more deadly because everything about it is daintily neat, from the stopper covered ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... was a solemn person, full of the stiff formality exhibited by members of the French magistracy, the juniors especially. He was dressed in discreet black, his clean-shaven, imperturbable face showed over a stiff collar, and he wore the conventional white tie of ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... opened his mouth agitatedly, and his eyebrows wrinkled in pained surprise. Yet once more his eyes sought the white tie and his hand reached for the little man's arm, and, feeling at a loss just then for language of explanation, he hurried him up-stairs and into a room whose drawn curtains masked ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... Dress is decided by the hour at which the wedding takes place. If it is in the evening, the conventional evening dress is imperative. Black suit, dress coat, low-cut waistcoat, white tie, white or pale pearl-colored gloves, thin patent leather shoes and possibly a white flower in the ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... seemed drawn closely round her eyes, giving her almost a strained look. For the rest, her hair, smoothly brushed away from her face, was in perfect order, her prim little hat was at exactly the right angle, her little white tie alone relieved the sombreness of her black jacket. She sighed and suddenly felt a moistening of her hot eyes. She leaned far back into the ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... moments I was outside of the jail gate, and saw my fellow-clergyman, Mr. Stagers, in full broadcloth and white tie, coming down the street toward me. As usual, he was on his guard; but this time he had to deal with a man grown perfectly desperate, with everything to win and nothing to lose. My plans were made, and, wild as they were, I thought them worth the trying. ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... girl again. If anything in this world was certain, that was. She would go her way, and he his. Samuel Marlowe rose from his chair a new man, to greet his father, who came in at that moment fingering a snowy white tie. ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... these achievements, and John spent a week of the holidays at White Ladies, the Duke of Trent's Shropshire place. Here, for the first time, he saw that august and solemn personage, a Groom of the Chambers, with carefully-trimmed whiskers, a white tie, a silky voice, and the appearance of an archdeacon. This visit is recorded because it made a profound impression upon a plastic mind. John had never sat in the seats of the mighty. Verney Boscobel was a delightful old house, but it might have been put, stables and all, into ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... order to avoid such a meeting; but when Nastasia entered the room just now, he had been so overwhelmed with astonishment, that he had not thought of his father, and had made no arrangements to keep him out of the way. And now it was too late—there he was, and got up, too, in a dress coat and white tie, and Nastasia in the very humour to heap ridicule on him and his family circle; of this last fact, he felt quite persuaded. What else had she come for? There were his mother and his sister sitting before her, and she seemed to have forgotten their ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a circular brocaded chair, in which gold back and gold arms were one; a sufficiently decorative background for her shining decollete. Hugo, standing and fingering his white tie, looked down at her with no loss of confidence in ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the ends of his white tie through the loop in the middle with infinite care. In a very wide circle of acquaintances he was universally known as "Charlie" Munro; and you had only to look at him to see how appropriate was this gallant diminutive. His head was bald at the top, but cleanly and beautifully ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... in 1872 to Catharine, my wife. At our weddin' we had plenty to eat. There wus possums, wine, cake, an' plenty o' fruits. I had on a black suit, black shoes, white tie an' shirt. Catharine had on all white. I stay' wood Catharine people for a year 'til I wus abled to buil' on my lan'. I am a fadder of nineteen chillun; ten boys an' nine ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... you said and I can't stay on here and be thought a quitter. So I'm taking the seven-one to New York and will be home day after tomorrow. I wish you would pack my things up for me when you get time. There isn't any great hurry. I've got enough for awhile. You're to keep the racket and the blue and white tie and the opal matrix pin and anything else you like to remember me by. Please do this, Tim. I'll write from home and tell you about sending the trunk. I'm awfully sorry, Tim, and I'm going to miss you like anything, but I shan't ever come back here. Maybe we will get ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... opportunity of saying a word in season. So I suppose she must have gathered it from my attire, though as a matter of fact I haven't been wearing a collar, and those men who wanted to cook me, pulled off my white tie and I didn't think it worth while dirtying a ...
— When the World Shook - Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and Arbuthnot • H. Rider Haggard |
