"Monocle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that the Adams stock was famous, but the marquis did not heed her. He peered at her niece through a gold-rimmed monocle. The princess had left the group near the table and with two young men slowly moved down the salon. Miss Adams was immediately surrounded by some antiquated gentlemen wearing orders, who paid her compliments in the manner of the eighteenth century. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... "You think I'm drivel-happy, eh? Well, maybe a long scar down the cheek would do even better. Or, possibly, you ought to wear a monocle, ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... it with no warning. Onto de stage came a tllooll (you know him, I t'ink), and a shiyooch'iid. The shiyooch'iid was riding a bicycle—I mean a monocle. One wheel. The tllooll moved just as awkward as he always does, and tried to ride a tandem four-wheeled vehicle which had ...
— Show Business • William C. Boyd
... had ever seen. In the agitation of the moment I forgot my name, my fortune, my aunt, and the Crimson Diamond—all these I forgot in a purely human impulse to see clearly; and to that end I removed my monocle from my left eye. Some moments later I came to myself and feebly replaced it. It was too late; the mischief was done. I was not aware at first of the exact state of my feelings—for I had never been ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... the Y.M.C.A. building sauntered the Reporter. Perceiving the Candy Wagon at the curb he paused, scrutinising it jauntily, through a monocle formed by a ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... the first time she stared about her, trying to see what there was... She blinked; her lovely eyes wondered. A very good-looking elderly man stared back at her through a monocle on a black ribbon. But him she simply couldn't see. There was a hole in the air where he was. She looked through ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... own walk, as if overcome by emotion, as he rallied his men for embarkation. Just as the gang-plank slid inside upon its rollers, however, something happened which brought back the ever-ready laughter to the girls' lips. A young exquisite, with a monocle who had been hovering around one party, in which were two or three pretty girls whose sly fun at his expense he was too dense to appreciate, thought it would be a cunning thing to fling after them the handkerchief ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... other noblemen; therefore it was not ambition on her part. He could have married any number of wealthier American girls; therefore it was not avarice on his part. He was a good-looking, stalwart chap with a very fetching drawl, infinite gentility, and a man despite his monocle, while she was beautiful, witty and womanly; therefore it is reasonable to suspect that it must have been love that made her ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... wearing with modest dignity her crown of white hair, and a little vivacious man with shrewd eyes, came in suddenly—Madame Marmet and M. Paul Vence. Then, carrying himself very stiffly, with a square monocle in his eye, appeared M. Daniel Salomon, the arbiter of elegance. The ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... about the Italian Garden I happened to glance up at the mansion—I mean the camp—and I saw by the window a rather jolly old buck with a waxed moustache and a monocle, smoking a good cigar and perusing his after-breakfast newspaper. A gardener told me that this tranquil old bird was Willett Senior, who had arrived the evening before from Europe via New York. So I went straight into that house and I disregarded the butler, second man, valet, ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... parted hair over a small head festooned with ringlets, a fichu, and mits painted on her fingers. "Beulah," she said with a mischievous flash of a grimace at Eleanor. "Gertrude,"—a dashing young brunette in riding clothes. "Jimmie,"—a curly haired dandy. "David,"—a serious creature with a monocle. "I couldn't find Peter," she said, "but we'll make him some day out of ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... about the waist and hips as to suggest the use of stays, but partially camouflage the corpulency of middle age. His head looks like a new-laid egg which has been highly varnished; his pointed beard is clipped in a fashion which reminded me of the bronze satyrs in the Naples museum; a monocle, worn without a cord, conceals his dead eye, which he lost in battle. His walk is a combination of a mince and a swagger; his movements are those of an actor who knows that the ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... not remember having seen before. His attire was that of a conventional tourist, and his face, words and bearing suggested the conventional foreigner. He wore a short, stubby black mustache and side whiskers, a monocle in one eye, and he had a vacuous expression on his face as of a person of immense profundity ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... little, but a moment later the relentless rake would drag it back to the bank. His chance to play the good Samaritan to the derelicts of the American Comic Opera Company was fast approaching the dim horizon of lost opportunities. Presently he screwed the monocle into his eye and squinted at the sea, the palaces on the promontory, the yachts in the harbor, all tranquil in ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... told him some joke and she is laughing at it. He has put his monocle in his other eye in his effort to see the point. He will get it by the next boat. Wish she'd come and tell that joke to me. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... undergone. He had come to the army resentfully, a rabid socialist with a keen contempt for "the upper classes" which he had never concealed. The upper classes were people who wore high white collars, turned up the ends of their trousers and affected a monocle. They spoke a kind of drawling English and said, "By gad, dear old top—what perfectly ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... a pair of elegant horseshow riding trousers and a monocle on the figure of the hero, an Idaho cowboy, she heard a low sound, several times repeated. She went quickly to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... the midst of the excited Four. His hair was parted precisely, and he had induced a monocle to remain in his eye long enough to examine the Scimitar, his nose at the critical elevation. This unruffled exterior made a deep impression on the Four. Was the Celebrity not undergoing the crucial test of a true sport? He was an example alike to criminals ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... monocle chain. You can get them both for three dollars," Honey added sweetly, affecting not to notice Skinner's ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... of the troops on Ullr, threw his cigarette away and set his monocle more firmly in his eye, stepping forward to let Brigadier-General Themistocles M'zangwe and little Colonel Hideyoshi O'Leary follow him out of the fort. On the little hundred-foot-square parade ground in front of the keep, his aircar was parked, ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... cord was hanging round Percival Hannington's neck and led to a top pocket of his vest. Phil felt positive it terminated in a monocle and, as the stranger's fingers wandered down the cord, Phil, in his dread of what was about to happen, laid his hand restrainingly over ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... be seen, however, indicative of the traveler's name. He surveyed his surroundings with lively interest shining in his gray eyes, one of which peered through a monocle encircled by a thin rim of tortoise shell. He watched the fussy customs officials, who, by some strange mischance, overlooked his belongings. Finally he made an ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... non-possumus attitude on the joint income-tax question as to consent to receive a deputation of Members interested, and even to allow them to be accompanied by a small number of ladies. Mr. CHAMBERLAIN, by the way, has exchanged his hereditary monocle for a pair of ordinary spectacles, which may account for his taking a less one-sided view of ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... aligned and resting on the hardwood floor. In graceful unison they removed their masks; three flushed and unusually pretty faces regarded the author of their being attentively—more attentively still when that round and ruddy gentleman, executing a facial contortion, screwed his monocle into an angry left ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... mirth, variously concealed, was what would be called a colored man at home, though not a negro; but he was not many removes in complexion from the original Negrito. He was toying with a cigar, and wore a monocle and a "stovepipe" hat. His trousers were a sort of plaid; and his upper works were covered with what looked like a blouse, though it was really his shirt, with a linen bosom, secured with studs. At the base of his figure was a pair of patent-leather shoes, though he ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic
... gentleman, which, in the usual sense of the word, he was not. He was of middle height, slim and not inelegant of build; his trousers, though shiny, were creased in the right place; his coat fitted him though it lacked two buttons, and he dangled a monocle, which he screwed impartially now into one brown eye, now into the other. If any one would know, as they very properly might, whether Henry was a bad man or a good, I can only reply that we are all of us mixed, and most of us not very ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... always influenced by a sentence he had read somewhere about "one of those globe-trotters you meet carrying a monkey-wrench in Calcutta, then in raiment and a monocle at the Athenaeum." He would learn some Kiplingy trade that would teach him the use of astonishingly technical tools, also daring and the location of smugglers' haunts, copra islands, and ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... secured a big top hat, a pair of trousers much too baggy and big for me, a swallow-tail coat with tails formed of white and red strips—a regular Uncle Sam's costume—had a big flaming bow about twelve inches in width and a ridiculous monocle. I think my rig-out transformed me into a hybrid of Brother Jonathan, Charlie Chaplin and an English dude. My dress was completed by a biscuit tin suspended by a band from my shoulder and in which I rattled my money. On the face ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... about eleven o'clock in the morning when an elegant carriage stopped in front of the court-house. A gentleman stepped out, and was about to ascend the broad steps of the building, when he suddenly stood still. He clapped his monocle to his eye, ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... already begun to cause millions to change hands, it was the proper thing to entertain the man who was the best placed for the conduct of these absurdly vain transactions. Schwalbach did not speak, contenting himself with gazing around him through his enormous monocle, shaped like a hand magnifying-glass, and with smiling in his beard over the singular neighbours made by this unique assembly. Thus it happened that M. de Monpavon had quite close to him—and it was a sight to watch how the disdainful curve of his nose was ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... acknowledged—were at rest, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone, in the autonomy of their curves and angles. And in these men, in the thick of whom Swann now found himself packed, there was nothing (even to the monocle which many of them wore, and which, previously, would, at the most, have enabled Swann to say that so-and-so wore a monocle) which, no longer restricted to the general connotation of a habit, the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... task I had before me was easier than I expected. There were fewer barges in waiting than on most days. Here and there a tip to a bridge-master (a gulden stuck conspicuously in my eye, like a silver monocle, just long enough to suggest a different destination) worked wonders, and in an hour I had piloted "Lorelei" through the water-streets of Gouda, ready to take her passengers again on the Leiden side. Standing at the wheel, I had eaten a sandwich and drunk a glass ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... eyes and an older sister who opens the performance with some good work. This seems to me to be the modern touch, for there was a time when it was always the very well groomed ringmaster, with top hat and monocle, who acted as host ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... flat head on which the closely cropped hair stood brush-fashion upright. He had an insignificant pale face to which a specious individuality was given by a moustache with ends waxed up to the eyes and by a monocle with a tortoise shell rim. He was dressed (his valet had misjudged things—and valets like the rest of us are fallible) in what was yesterday a ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... make a point of absolutely ignoring Pritchard's presence. Elizabeth was the one exception. She was carrying a tiny Chinese spaniel under one arm; with the fingers of her other hand she held a tortoise-shell mounted monocle to her eye, and stared directly at the two men. Presently she came languidly across the room ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... you mean—" he began stormily, then, meeting her quiet, humorous gaze, stammered off into silence. Presently he fixed his monocle in one of his fierce old eyes and surveyed her from behind it as from behind ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... it. Yonder on the Oregon is a complete railroad, which will be running from the coast to the mines in a few weeks. Another ship back there has the wire and poles and fixings for a telephone system, which will go up in a night. As to tables d'hote, I saw a real French count in Seattle with a monocle. He's bringing in a restaurant outfit, imported snails, and pate de joies gras. All that's wanting is the chaperon. In my flight from the Ohio I left mine. The sailors caught her. You see I am not far ahead ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... nonentity in impeccable dress, dangling a monocle and trying to make small-talk, the while he dallied with a Bronx cocktail, costing more than a day's wage for a childish flower-making slave of the tenements, and inhaled a Rotten Row cigarette, the "last word" from London in the tobacco line. To the sallies ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... monotonous, monoplane, monopoly, monocle, monarchy, monogram, monomania; (2) monosyllable, monochrome, monogamy, monorail, monograph, monolith, monody, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... sees the moon as a silver blur. The colour-blind man may rejoice in the fairy-trick which enables him to live under a green sun and a blue moon. But if once it be held that there is nothing but a silver blur in one man's eye or a bright circle (like a monocle) in the other man's, then neither is free, for each is shut up in the cell of a ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... the army had called just after we arrived, and had given us instructions. Like all the British officers we met in the field, he treated us with the greatest kindness and consideration. Faultless in dress, precise in manner, with monocle and carefully trimmed hair and moustache, he gave one the impression of just having stepped from his dressing room after a bath. And yet his knowledge of the military game as it applied to the medical service was just as accurate, precise and complete ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... a small porte at its forward pointed end. The control room was here, a small cubby of levers and banks of dial-faces. Three men, evidently the operators, sat within. They were dressed like Tako save that they each had a great round lens like a monocle on the left eye, with dangling wires from it leading to dials fastened ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... Watching the endless stream of naked white Bodies of men for whom their hasty award Means life or death, maybe, or the living death Of mangled limbs, blind eyes or darkened brain: And the chairman, as his monocle falls again, Pronounces each ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... or a reception committee for American heiresstocracy, which also dedicates buildings, poses for stamps, post-cards, motion pictures and raises princesses of Wales for magazine articles and crowning purposes. B. is a monitor of English style; wears a monocle, spats, 'i 'at, cane, pipe, awful accent, and never makes his appearance without a cawld bawth. He detests the word "egotism." Is a celebrated humorist, seeing through all jokes but himself. Ambition: 'Ome sweet 'Ome. Recreation: Tea, Week Ends. Address: Hingland. ...
— Who Was Who: 5000 B. C. to Date - Biographical Dictionary of the Famous and Those Who Wanted to Be • Anonymous
... reached into a vest pocket, and to Hillard's horror produced a monocle, which he ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... eyes are the smoldering flames of an undying superstition, and these same men thrill as they tell over again the strange and unbelievable story of Hartshope, the aristocratic Englishman who set off into the North in all the glory of monocle and unprecedented luggage, and how he joined in a tribal war, became a chief of the Dog Ribs, and married a dark-eyed, sleek-haired, little Indian beauty, who is now ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... mortifications to appear so greatly embarrassed became stronger than the embarrassment itself that I could by will power force my head to a straight construction and look out upon my spectators firmly. On the second day of my ordeal, so facing the laughers, I found myself facing straight into the monocle of my half-brother and ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... he said, stopping as suddenly. "Man of the world, eh? You'll understand that when a gentleman has grievances...." He fumbled in his waistcoat-pocket and found a black-rimmed monocle and inserted it in his eye. There was an obscenity in the appearance of this foul wreck of a man which made ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... ways than one he reminds me of Peter. But Captain Goodhue is a much older man, and is English, coming from a very excellent family in Sussex. He's one of those iron-gray ex-Army men who still believe in a monocle and can be loyal to a queen even though she wears a basque with darts in it. And he doesn't talk to a woman with that ragging air of condescension which seems to be peculiar to western American civilization. He is courteous and thoughtful and sincere, though ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... after the first rush of their entrance was over, and as he waited in the drawing-room for an opportunity of speaking to her, he chatted with Franzel, an attache of the Austrian embassy, to whom Sanderson had introduced him. Franzel was a gloomy young man with a monocle, and he was waiting for a particular girl, who happened to be the daughter of the Spanish Ambassador. And, this being his object, he had chosen his position with care, near the door of the drawing-room, and Armitage shared for ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... clutching the railings and craning his neck into the garden. He even looked comparatively young when he took his hat off, having fair hair parted in the middle and carefully curled on each side, and lively movements, especially of the hands. He had a dandified monocle slung round his neck by a broad black ribbon, and a big bow tie, as if a big American moth had alighted on him. His dress and gestures were bright enough for a boy's; it was only when you looked at the fish-bone face that you beheld something ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton |
