"Hothouse" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well as on that of caste or clan (patriotism); i.e., on sentiments of sympathy and duty toward certain individuals who are more closely connected with us, sentiments which are hereditary in man. A vague general humanitarian sentiment, a hothouse flower which is still feeble, has already commenced to grow on this natural basis. Let us hope that it ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... him of a resource. At intervals, during his life, he had aided his father in the occupation of gardening. He could dig, plant, and sow. He could prune trees, and propagate flowers to perfection. He understood the management of the greenhouse and hothouse, the cold-pit and the forcing-pit; nay, more—he understood the names and nature of most of the plants that are cultivated in European countries; in other words, he was a botanist. His early opportunities in the garden of a great noble, where his father was superintendent, had given ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... sorry for me. Think of it, and without admiring me. Other men have professed for poor Sonia Turgeinov a little interest or solicitude at divers times and places, but it has always been accompanied with something else. Is that beyond the understanding of your pure soul, nourished in a hothouse, Mademoiselle?" There was a sudden hard ring of rebellion in her tones. "Am I handsome? Your eyes said it not long ago. Ma foi!" Her voice becoming light again. "It was Parsifal himself who talked with me in the park—that place for rendezvous and ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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 his ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... the Hothouse. The element of natural growth is pushed to one side and the hothouse and the force-pump are substituted. Nature looks on tolerantly as she says: "So far you may go, but no farther, ...
— The Majesty of Calmness • William George Jordan
... met her at the station, looking reassuringly cheerful and at ease a magnificent new motor stood in waiting outside, with a cart for the luggage. Inside the beautiful old house the atmosphere was warmed by hot pipes, and scented with the fragrance of hothouse plants, banked together in every corner. It was not the usual case of being warm and cosy inside a room, and miserably chilled every time one crossed a passage or ascended the stairs. Mrs Percival and the girls were marvels of ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... 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 thus been ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Ville-Handry's only daughter—the heiress of many millions, brought up, so to say, in a hothouse, according to the stupid custom of modern society—knew nothing at all of life, of its bitter realities, its struggles, and its sufferings. ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... filled 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 to laugh or to be scornful, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... may well be the hothouse atmosphere in which alone his genius can thrive, but from another point of view it seems a subtle poison gas, engendering all the ills that differentiate him from other men. Its first effect is likely to be the reflection that his ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... 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 ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... every 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.
... destructive philosophy of education has not swept out the gentler virtues from them. As yet they have not come under the keen edge of its influence. For their chastity, then, they are interesting; whereas the manufactured virtue of the upper middle class is like the hothouse strawberry—forced in May—a tempting fruit to lay upon a dish, but tasteless, as is ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... by flapping hats. The children scorned gloves and all fine clothes as much as they did the carriage; and here they were—little Hugh in his velvet suit, looking so fair and bright-haired; Anastasia dressed out in ribbons, and with a very large bouquet of hothouse flowers in her hand. The ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... their own hothouses; and I saw the hothouses, afterwards. Most beautiful! the purple and white grapes were hanging in thick clusters all over the vines; and quantities of different sorts of pines were growing in another hothouse. I had a bunch of Frontignacs this morning before breakfast, father; and I never ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner
... to utilise its lands to the best advantage. Let it develop each nation's products as the result of natural selection. We can grow rice in India, we can grow wheat in Russia. We can put up a high tariff wall and grow rice in Russia, if we grow it in a hothouse; but it would not be so profitable as raising wheat. Tariff walls are trade restrictions. They are as obsolete as the ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... 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
... 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 ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... bear a hand here. We've got to hurry, too, if we are to make any hay this year." He then told us that the old Squire had driven to the village six miles away, to get a load of hothouse glass. While we stood pondering that bit of puzzling information, a third hired man drove into the yard on a heavy wagon drawn by a span of work horses. On the wagon was the old fire box and the boiler of a stationary steam engine that we had had for some time in the shook ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... 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 ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... say, "The Maker of all these wonders is my friend!" Their eyes have never been opened to see that they are trifles; mine have been, and will be till they are closed for ever. They think a fine estate, a large conservatory, a hothouse rich as a West Indian garden, things of consequence; visit them with pleasure, and muse upon them with ten times more. I am pleased with a frame of four lights, doubtful whether the few pines it contains will ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... traveller this possibly may communicate some definite ideas: but who else from seeing a plant in an herbarium can imagine its appearance when growing in its native soil? Who from seeing choice plants in a hothouse can magnify some into the dimensions of forest trees, and crowd others into an entangled jungle? Who when examining in the cabinet of the entomologist the gay exotic butterflies, and singular cicadas, will associate with these lifeless objects the ceaseless harsh music of ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... Warfield arrived, the flowers in the bowl were yellow. Marie-Louise stayed in bed all of the morning. She had ordered the flowers sent up from the hothouse, and, dragging a length of silken dressing-gown behind her, she had arranged them. Then she had had her breakfast on ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... Major, in alarm. "For mercy's sake, John, don't go to sleep and catch any more of those terrible ideas. No one knows where the next one might carry us—to Timbuktu or Yucatan, probably. Let's stick to California and settle the question before your hothouse brain grows ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... James Rothschild sent Rossini some splendid grapes from his hothouse. Rossini, in thanking him, wrote, "Bien que vos raisins soient superbes, je n'aime pas mon vin en pillules." This Baron Rothschild read as an invitation to send him some of his celebrated Chateau-Lafitte, which he proceeded to do, for "the joke of it," he remarked. ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... waistcoats cut very low so as to show a large amount of white shirt front, in which the gold and precious stones of their studs glistened, and were looking at the boxes full of ladies in low dresses, covered with diamonds and pearls, and who were expanding like flowers in that illuminated hothouse, where the beauty of the faces and the whiteness of their shoulders seemed to bloom in order to be looked at, in the midst of the music ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... wife? Or would she plot with sin, and seek to plunder Love's sanctuary, and cast away its treasure, That she might keep her freedom and her pleasure? Could she be loyal mate and mother dutiful? Or is she only some bright hothouse bloom, Seedless and beautiful, Meant just for decoration, and for show?' Alone here in my room, I hear this voice of Reason. My poor heart Has ever but one answer to ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... came To bring me fruit or wine, Or sometimes hothouse flowers. And at nights I lay awake Often and often thinking What to do for her sake. Wet or dry it was the same: She would come in at all hours, Set me eating and drinking, And say I must grow strong; At last the ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... applauded with both hands, and vowed that Jean-Baptiste Rousseau had done nothing finer. Sixte, Baron du Chatelet, thought in his heart that this slip of a rhymster would wither incontinently in a hothouse of adulation; perhaps he hoped that when the poet's head was turned with brilliant dreams, he would indulge in some impertinence that would promptly consign him to the obscurity from which he had emerged. Pending the decease of genius, Chatelet appeared to offer up his hopes as a sacrifice ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... malformed, the brainless go back to the earth from which they came. Let the world of humanity be cleansed and sweetened and purified as Nature cleanses and sweetens and purifies her own kingdom. She removes her failures; we put ours under glass and treat them like hothouse flowers. That is called humanity; it is the mad leading the mad.... But why waste your time? Nature will have the last word; Reason must win in the end; a genius, at once thinker and doer, will come along some day and put the world right, at a ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... thanks before an assent had been spoken, and tripped smilingly away, while Peggy went back to the big room to find a great tray full of hothouse treasures waiting to be arranged, and no availing vases in which to place them. The flowers, however, were so beautiful, and the fronds of maidenhair so green and graceful, that the work was a pleasure; she enjoyed discovering unlikely ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... 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 influence of that ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... to feel the effects of the arduous campaign. The rainy season was imminent, and malaria and blackwater fever claimed their victims by the score. The troops who had spent the previous five months stewing in the hothouse atmosphere of the Jordan Valley suffered particularly heavily through malignant malaria, contracted during those months, which lay dormant while operations were actually in progress and appeared when men were run down and weakened by their ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... at breakfast and at dinner a bunch, big or little, of simple or hothouse flowers lay beside the girl's plate, without name ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... 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 terribly aggressive ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... leg of 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
... there was as a set off against all the rest—namely, the extraordinary wealth of flowers which grew thickly amongst the thousand varieties of rare ferns all over the land. What would be held as the most delicate hothouse plants in England here formed a brilliant carpet in their wild luxuriance. We literally walked knee ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... 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 ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... can. Haven't you noticed that, although they have the most exquisite skins and beautiful eyes and hair and all that sort of thing, not a man or woman of them has any colouring? I suppose that's the result of living for generations in a hothouse." ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... the negress caught her by the wrist violently, at the same moment waving me off. I felt faint and giddy, as though some exhalation from the graveyard—not wholly repellent, but sickly, overpowering, like the scent of a hothouse lily—had been suddenly wafted under my nostrils. I fell back a pace as the negress motioned me away. Her hand pointed across the stream, and across the meadow, to ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... with Beatrice were rare events now because he was so keen on the business of looking for his Colorado protegee. He gave them up reluctantly. Every time they went out together into the open Miss Whitford became more discontented with the hothouse existence she was living. He felt there was just a chance that if he were constant enough, he might sweep her off her feet into that deeper current of life that lay beyond the social shallows. But ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... round, 'yes. This is a most important matter. Mrs Wititterly is of a very excitable nature; very delicate, very fragile; a hothouse plant, an exotic.' ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... Saint-Jean-de-Luz at last, when he set foot on the soil, he had felt like one drunk—After the mist and the cold already begun in Northern France, he felt the sudden and voluptuous impression of a warmer climate, the sensation of going into a hothouse. There was a festival of sunlight that day; the southern wind, the exquisite southern wind, blew, and the Pyrenees had magnificent tints on the grand, free sky. Moreover, girls passed, whose laughter rang of the South and of Spain, who had the elegance and the grace of the Basques—and ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... on land after three months at sea is of itself a great change. But to be in such a land! The dark faces, with white turbans, and flowing robes; the trees not our trees; the very smell of the atmosphere that of a hothouse, and the architecture as strange as the vegetation." Every feature in that marvellous scene delighted him both in itself, and for the sake of the innumerable associations and images which it conjured up in his ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... 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 ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the dull ears quickened to catch the pleading accents of the blessed lord? 'Do it unto Me'? none would longer count their flowers and fruit their own, the Royal seal would be seen on each, whether growing wild in copses, or carefully nurtured in hothouse and conservatory, and these treasures would be poured out for those so sadly ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... rebellion of children who have acquired hardihood and common sense in their conflicts with one another. But the small families, which are the rule just now, succumb more easily; and in the case of a single sensitive child the effect of being forced in a hothouse atmosphere of unnatural affection ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... the demonstration,— A good old Norse one, sound, true-born, home-bred. You draw distinction between wedded pledges And those of Love: your Logic's without flaw. They are distinguished just as roast from raw, As hothouse bloom from wilding of the hedges! Love is with us a science and an art; It long ago since ceased to animate the heart. Love is with us a trade, a special line Of business, with its union, code and sign; It is a guild of married folks and plighted, Past-masters with apprentices united; ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... moment when chance, clumsily or wickedly, so suddenly revealed that crushing news, Guy saw so much irony that he could not forbear looking at them for a moment, almost insulting in their beauty and their hothouse bloom. ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... 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 or other hemisphere broke in for a while ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... than in any other quality. Bobby noticed that, unlike nearly all the women he knew, she used no colour on her lips, and only lightly dusted her face with powder, but her cheeks seemed always to have a bloom upon them as on grapes from a hothouse. ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... penetrated the windows, the doors, even the sun-baked walls, we had to listen to, read, and compare documents. Gnats of a ferocious kind, hatched by thousands in the hangings of this hothouse, flew around our perspiring heads. Their buzzing got the upper hand at intervals when the clerk's voice grew weary and, diminishing in volume, threatened to fade away ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... fine Nauclea is a common shady tree, and Bignonia indica, now leafless, but with immense pods hanging from the branches. Acanthaceae is the prevalent natural order, consisting of gay-flowered Eranthemums, Ruellias, Barlerias, and such hothouse favourites.* [Other plants gathered here, and very typical of the Flora of this dry region, were Linum trigynum, Feronia elephantum, Aegle marmelos, Helicteres Asoca, Abrus precatorius, Flemingia; various Desmodia, Rhynchosiae, Glycine, and Grislea tomentosa very abundant, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... a parcel of junior 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
... 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 race. We leisurely saunter up the huge stair, pausing at each landing-place ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... flower and does not come to its best estate before August, start it when you will—but an actual disadvantage. Like James Vick, I would emphasize the importance of never letting the plants get a check if the finest flowers are wanted. Now the Aster is not naturally a hothouse plant. It needs in its young stage plenty of fresh air. Without it, or without sufficient light, or in too warm an atmosphere, the young Aster plants become tall and spindling, or, as florists express it, are drawn. A drawn Aster invariably makes a weak, sickly plant, and ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... 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 of insects, the glassy pipe ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... papa, to expect as fine fruit as in a hothouse or sunny French vineyard. I really see no reason why we Canadians should not have regular vineyards some day, and you would see how our little grapes must improve under cultivation. Perhaps we might make wine. Now, you dear clever papa, just turn your attention to that, and earn ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... retirement is a rule, with a wholesome diet,—and she will in a few weeks show a marked improvement. Mrs. Stowe relates a very interesting story of a city-girl who had all to gratify her that fond parents could procure, and, though constitutionally strong, this hothouse, fashionable life had began to undermine her general health, and having exhausted the skill of the regular physician, her condition became so alarming that other counsel was sought; and this new disciple of Esculapius was a shrewd, honest ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... about eight miles from Tachienlu in a beautiful, lonely valley among the mountains. This is the favourite camping-place of Chengtu missionaries, who now and then brave the eleven days' journey to and fro to exchange their hothouse climate for a brief holiday in the glorious scenery and fine air of these health-giving uplands. We were mounted, the interpreter and I, on ponies provided by the Yamen, one worse than the other, and both unfit for the rough scramble. After traversing the town, first on one side and then ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... mission are the gardens, cut up into small squares by strong board fences to prevent the soil from blowing away, each with a tarpaulin near by to spread over it at night. In this laborious way potatoes, cabbages and turnips are raised. In a large hothouse the missionaries raise tomatoes, lettuce, and also flowers, but for everything else, except fish, game and ice, they have to depend on the yearly visit of the Moravian mission ship. She left for Nain just the day before we reached Hopedale, ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... carefully tended as any idle fine gentleman's, and there is neither fleck nor breath of dimness on the mirror-like steel of their armour; the very flowers, the roses and lilies that strew the way, are the perfection of fresh-cut hothouse blossoms; and when birds and beasts chance to be necessary to the composition of the picture, they are represented with no less care for a more than possible neatness, their coats are combed and curled, their attitudes are studied and graceful, they wear carefully ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... walls. None of them fixed himself there or made preparations for the transformation. I suspected that they wanted the choice of a spot in the open air, exposed to all the rigours of winter. I therefore left the door of the hothouse open. Soon the whole crowd ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... 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 see her serious eyes, the ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... all very charming. When the beetle woke up, he crept forth and looked around him. What splendour was in the hothouse! In the background great palm trees growing up on high; the sun made them look transparent; and beneath them what a luxuriance of green, and of beaming flowers, red as fire, yellow as amber, ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... stay!" chimes in Ma Gummidge. "I did the marketing myself today; and say, there's a rib roast of beef big enough for a hotel, mushrooms raised under glass, an alligator pear salad, and hothouse strawberries for dessert. Besides, you're about the only folks we know that we could ask ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... the crowded street-car which deposited her finally at Miss Chancellor's door, had to stand up all the way, half suspended by a leathern strap from the glazed roof of the stifling vehicle, like some blooming cluster dangling in a hothouse. She was used, however, to these perpendicular journeys, and though, as we have seen, she was not inclined to accept without question the social arrangements of her time, it never would have occurred to ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... is singular to see the numbers of orange and olive growers who choose to live so near to the "fiery element." But the heat presses forward the growth of vegetation. To be there is like living in a hothouse; and the soil is extraordinarily fertile. Hence the number of vineyards quite close to the base of Vesuvius. The cultivators endeavour to enclose their gardens with hard masses of lava, so as to turn off the flow of the molten streams in other directions; but the lava ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... few minutes in a little drawing-room, or boudoir, Piers stood marvelling at the ingenuity which had packed so much furniture and bric-tate-brac, so many pictures, so much drapery, into so small a space. He longed to throw open the window; he could not sit still in this odour-laden hothouse, where the very flowers were burdensome by excess. When Olga reappeared, she was gorgeous in flowing tea-gown; her tawny hair hung low in artful profusion; her neck and arms were bare, her ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... really lost; but the bubble had burst, leaving her nothing to hope, nothing to cling to, nothing but black despair; and half bewildered, she received the noisy greeting of Jessie, who met her at the door, and dragged her into the drawing-room, decorated with flowers from the hothouse, told her to ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... in mocha brown Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges Bananas figs and hothouse grapes; ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... the frou-frou of worshippers going to church, the voices and footsteps of worshippers returning from church, had floated up to the patient's open window. Sunlight had drawn across his room in one pale beam, and vanished. A few callers had called. Hothouse flowers, waxen and pale, had been left with messages of sympathy. Even Dr Critchett had respectfully and discreetly made inquiries on his ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... came from Havana, required a hothouse temperature: and this he always had in his own apartments. The house was, however, surrounded by extensive gardens, divided by railings, through and over which cats could easily climb, and in those gardens were trees inhabited by a great number of birds. Pierrot would frequently ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... as 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 ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... we see the seeds of all that is worst and most dangerous in the modern French polity: the hothouse which fostered into a growth, unknown elsewhere, that passion of envy, which Tocqueville regards as the radical vice, the paramount impulse, the fundamental principle, of Democracy. The peculiar reasons for this dominant sentiment of hatred and jealousy in the democracy of ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... to a girl that is not a caress; when necessary rebuke comes in tone of tenderest reproach; when "You have grieved me" has been the heaviest penalty for a youthful fault; when no anxiety has ever been allowed to trouble the young heart—then, when the hothouse flower is transplanted, and rough winds blow on it, it ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... 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 ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... contributed 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
... into 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
... hunt, Reynard, being hard pressed, was reduced to the necessity of taking refuge up a chimney of a hothouse. He was followed by one of the hounds, who, passing through a flue upwards of fifty feet in length, came out at the top of the chimney, but missed Reynard in its murky recess. By this time a number of people were collected at the top of the chimney, who let down a terrier, who soon made ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession of brilliant lights in some space beyond, from which there gushed in a wave of hothouse fragrance, warm, heavy, humid. It was a pretty little effect for guests new to the house, and was part of Elbridge Mavering's pleasure in this feature of his place. Mrs. Pasmer responded with generous sympathy, for if she really liked anything ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... 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
... vast white canopy of smoke from a burning forest to the eastward overhung the place, and partially obscured the sun; yet the heat was almost insupportable. The lodges stood crowded together without order in the narrow space. Each was a perfect hothouse, within which the lazy proprietor lay sleeping. The camp was silent as death. Nothing stirred except now and then an old woman passing from lodge to lodge. The girls and young men sat together in groups under the pine trees ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... and secure as the lighthouse on a rock, and as indifferent to the tumult 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, ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... fever, nevertheless we went down to the work-shed. It was a pitch-dark night, the air was like that in a hothouse, smelling of earth and mould. The surf boomed sullenly on the beach, and heavy squalls flogged the forest. Sometimes a rotten branch snapped, and the sound travelled, dull and ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... were on that throng of the first mounts in the Service; brilliant glances by the hundred gleamed down behind hothouse bouquets of their chosen color, eager ones by the thousand stared thirstily from the crowded course, the roar of the Ring subsided for a second, a breathless attention and suspense succeeded it; the Guardsmen sat on their drags, or lounged near the ladies with their ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... teachings; he burns incense to stupefy our senses, lights candles to obscure our sight, 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 entirely humane command—"Do unto others as you wish that they should ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... the only muse that can save from the omnipresent dangers of precocity. Thus we not only rescue from the danger of loss, but utilize for further psychic growth the results of the higher heredity, which are the most precious and potential things on earth. So, too, in our urbanized hothouse life, that tends to ripen everything before its time, we must teach nature, although the very phrase is ominous. But we must not, in so doing, wean still more from, but perpetually incite to visit, field, forest, hill, shore, the water, flowers, animals, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... they exist; and that is all that any one can say. The gift is not handed down: the man of talent has a fool for a son. Nor is it acquired; but it is improved by practice. He who has not the germ of it in his veins will never possess it, in spite of all the pains of a hothouse education. ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... natives kwango, the black man's bread, a flaky, sticky flour that tastes like boiled chestnuts; and pineapples at a franc for ten. And such pineapples! Not hard and rubber-like, as we know them at home, but delicious, juicy, melting in the mouth like hothouse grapes, and, also, after each mouthful, making a complete bath necessary. One of the French officers had a lump of ice which he broke into pieces and divided with the others. They saluted magnificently ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... dam" and the 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 often ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... chill, with so sooty a sky, that my friend the artist, who had just been reading in the London paper that his work had not caught the glamour and the colour of Venice, that the South had not yet revealed its passionate secrets to him, chuckled grimly. What is all this nonsense about an Italian hothouse? At Florence I was afraid of being snow-bound in the sunny South. For, long and heavily, though ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... a minute," he said, in a coaxing tone. "Don't you want a nice big saucer of strawberries and cream before you go? Walker's picking some now. And you haven't seen my hothouse. It's just full of the loveliest flowers you ever saw. You like roses, don't you, and pinks and lilies ...
— The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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
... 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. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... alcazar of imperial Toledo, the sunny towers of stately Seville, to the eternal snows and lovely vega of Granada: let the geologist clamber over mountains of marble, and metal-pregnant sierras, let the botanist cull from the wild hothouse of nature plants unknown, unnumbered, matchless in colour, and breathing the aroma of the sweet south; let all, learned or unlearned, listen to the song, the guitar, the Castanet; let all mingle with the gay, good-humoured, temperate peasantry, the finest in the world, free, manly, and independent, ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... "The day I land is going 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 vanilla ice cream ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... inspiration. Only a crayon, but wonderfully lifelike and carefully finished, as few of the others were. This had been handsomely framed and now held the place of honor, garlanded with green wreaths, while the great Indian jar below blazed with a pyramid of hothouse flowers sent by Kitty. Rose was giving these a last touch, with Dulce close by, cooing over a handful of sweet "daffydowndillies," when the sound of wheels sent her flying to the door. She meant to have spoken the first welcome and had the first embrace, but when she saw the altered face in the ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... their perfumes through the room, and the plate and crystal glittered on the snowy cloth, an abundance of delicious and unexpected dishes were handed round—a sturgeon from Russia, prohibited game, truffles as big as eggs, and hothouse vegetables and fruit as full of flavour as if they had been naturally matured. It was money flung out of window, simply for the pleasure of wasting more than other people, and eating what they could not procure. The influential critic, though he displayed the ease of a man accustomed ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Cloth-o'-Gold rose, and my yellow-shaded candles made little auxiliary welcomes. Whoever Calliope's guests were, we would do them honour and give them the best we had. And in the midst of all came from the City the box with my gift of hothouse fruit and a rosebud ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... notice—one, a low tree, with leaves somewhat like 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 wonderful Norantea,' which shall be ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... opposite beds, the one its white, the other its red banner. Two of the Muses, the Speciosa and Paravisogna, or bread-tree plant, were raising their light spiry trunks out of a corbeille taller than a life-guardsman. They want no hothouse in Naples:—would you shade your face from the sun, an elsewhere exotic, the Brazilian Camarotta at your feet, furnishes you with a screen. The white flocks of the Acacia verticillata are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... 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 of a ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... picture Mr. Lloyd-Jones as a garden pink. But then, Auntie, you remember how eloquent he was about the hills and the stars. That speech did not at all indicate a hothouse nature." ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... 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 as to have them in fruit in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 358, November 11, 1882 • Various
... acquaintance must have been of the slightest, as she called me a 'nice little boy,' but I have unfading memories of that peach. It was one of those exuberant peaches that meet you halfway, so to speak, and are all over you in a moment. It was a beautiful unspoiled product of a hothouse, and yet it managed quite successfully to give itself the airs of a compote. You had to bite it and imbibe it at the same time. To me there has always been something charming and mystic in the thought of that delicate velvet globe ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... 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 ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Atlantic, and Harley, at least, was her faithful subject. At the water's edge was great kelp, and barnacles, and jellyfish, all pink and purple; and on the summit was a little grove of juniper and savin bushes, with some wild flowers; and on the cedar branches grew most beautiful bunches of hothouse grapes. To be sure, they were tied on by ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... Horace; and after all these fascinating but doubtful Lydes, Neaeras, and Pyrrhas, it is pleasant to come across a young beauty like this Phyllis, sic fidelem, sic lucro aversam. She, at least, is a fresh and fragrant violet among the languorous hothouse ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... brilliant and 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 ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a gleam of light can creep through the misty atmosphere. The earth seems clothed in a garment of clouds, and the air is positively reeking with damp warmth, like the air of a hothouse. This explains ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... of 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 considered as a mark of well-bred femininity. She knew that she was beautiful ...
— In the Clutch of the War-God • Milo Hastings
... he 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
... to have done was to take the whisky, make him look at it all round and tell it, with his own conviction and not mine, to go to hell. I ought never, never to have protected him, and made him a hothouse plant." ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... of the multiflora rose. The garden sloped away from the house, and contained an abundance of both flowers and fruits. There was the aloe, and more than one kind of cactus, growing freely in the open air, with many other plants which would need the hothouse or greenhouse in a colder climate. Fig-trees, vines, standard peach, and nectarine trees were in great abundance, while a fence of the sharp Kangaroo Island acacia effectually kept all inquisitive cattle at a respectful distance. The inside of the house ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... twilight, and blindman's buff. These innocent gambols they carried on in the wide entrance hall. Some flags had been hung, to please Milly, against the heavy beams of the ceiling, and the gardener had filled every niche and corner with hothouse plants. ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... hundred francs a month inclusive. In Gersau it was generally believed, however, that the gardener and his wife, in spite of their pretensions, used the cook's name as a screen to net the little profits of this bargain. The Bergmanns had made beautiful gardens round their house, and had built a hothouse. The flowers, the fruit, and the botanical rarities of this spot were what had induced the young lady to settle on it as she passed through Gersau. Miss Fanny was said to be nineteen years old; she was the old man's youngest child, and the object of his adulation. About two ...
— Albert Savarus • Honore de Balzac
... a small bunch of hothouse grapes from her breakfast tray and, after picking one off, suddenly began ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and conductor Pugnani, with his pupil Viotti (the latter playing second violin in the orchestra), were members of the company. And the King's band of foreign and native players has been called one of the best in Europe. Still, all this was but the hothouse bloom of exotics. To bring about a natural harvest of home produce something else was wanted than royal patronage, and this something sprang from the series of disasters that befell the nation in the latter half of the last century, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... possibility produce. The loss upon a pound 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 Chimes • Charles Dickens
... must she also endure suffering, aye, torture, as the final implacable breaking-up of the human organism? And she suffers thus, poor wretch! in one of the servant's rooms, where the sun, shining in through a window in the sloping roof, makes the air as stifling as in a hothouse, and where there is so little room that the doctor has to put his hat on the bed. We struggled to the last to keep her, but finally we had to make up our minds to let her go away. She was unwilling ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... 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 ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... of the scrolls. Her elbow, reaching beyond, touched a small table on which stood a vase of white frosted glass; over the rim of it profuse crimson carnations hung their heads. They were one of her favorite winter flowers, and he had had these sent out to her this afternoon from a hothouse of the distant town by a half-frozen messenger. Near her head curtains of crimson brocade swept down the wall to the floor from the golden-lustred window cornices. At her back were cushions of crimson silk. At the other end of the sofa her piano stood and ...
— Bride of the Mistletoe • James Lane Allen
... room, the golden glimmer of her hair, her wonderful white waxy face, and 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 ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... and inspiring as it is to read this story of diligent and discriminating cultivation, of accurate truth and real erudition and beauty, not vaguely but methodically interpreted, one has some of the sensations of the moral and intellectual hothouse. Mental hygiene is apt to lead to mental valetudinarianism. 'The ignorant journalist,' may be left to the torment which George Eliot wished that she could inflict on one of those literary slovens whose manuscripts bring even the most philosophic editor to the point ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 3 of 3) - The Life of George Eliot • John Morley |
