"Opalescent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... behind the' lettered draperies there are miracles of shell-work for sale at absurdly small prices. The glazed cases laid flat upon the matted platforms, the shelved cabinets set against the walls, are all opalescent with nacreous things—extraordinary surprises, incredible ingenuities; strings of mother-of-pearl fish, strings of mother-of-pearl birds, all shimmering with rainbow colours. There are little kittens of mother-of-pearl, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... inspiration and yet of its own will it has begun a transformation of itself into the likeness of what it dreamed in those evanescent buildings and courts and columns and statues and frescoes out by the opalescent waters of its sea. It saw the reflection of that "White City" in the lake and then the image of its own workaday face —and it has not forgotten what manner ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... once more upon the beach like an opalescent shell, Jacqueline, ankle-deep in foam, looked out across the flaming ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... was far advanced when Mr. Wilding and his two companions descended to Uplyme Common from the heights whence as they rode they had commanded a clear view of the fair valley of the Axe, lying now under a thin opalescent ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... strong coffee Wen Ho brought for him, two great cups of it, and he ate a piece of broiled elk meat. Then he went out again and walked rapidly down the trail. It was not yet dark; the world was in a soft glow of rose and violet, opalescent lights. The birds were singing in a hundred chantries. And there, through the firs, a sight to stop his heart, Joan came walking toward him, graceful, free, a swinging figure, bareheaded, her rags girded beautifully about her. And up and up to him she came soundlessly over the pine needles and ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... created with one universal wink. At the top of the tragic trees I should not find the Angel's Nest. I should only find the Mare's Nest; the dreamy and divine nest is not there. In the Mare's Nest I shall discover that dim, enormous opalescent egg from which is hatched the Nightmare. For there is nothing so delightful as a nightmare—when you know it is ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Sacre du printemps." For with Strawinsky, the rhythms of machinery enter musical art. With this his magistral work a new chapter of music commences, the spiritualization of the new body of man is manifest. Through Debussy, music had liquified, become opalescent and impalpable and fluent. It had become, because of his sense, his generation's sense, of the infirmity of things, a sort of symbol of the eternal flux, the eternal momentariness. It had come to body forth all that merges and changes ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... like the roof of a tunnel open at one end. By day a greyish light, filtered through smoke and grit and steam. Lamps, opaque white globes, hanging in the thick air like dead moons. By night a bluish light, and large, white globes grown opalescent like moons, lit again ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... not very brilliant intellectually. Cowperwood's judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk, possibly in a bank. Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent heart. After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this budding character. He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of women ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... be noted that these perfumes are never to be filled into wet bottles, for if in any way damp from water, a minute portion of the ottos are separated, which gives an opalescent appearance to the mixture. Indeed, all bottles should be spirit rinsed prior to being filled with any perfume, but especially with those containing essences ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... in his hands, Harley had been forced to admit that he never had. It was of the texture and roughness of granite, but more heavily shot with quartz, or tridymite than any other granite he'd ever seen. It had a dull opalescent sheen, too. But it was ...
— The Planetoid of Peril • Paul Ernst
... testing a sample of 0.2 to 0.4 grm. of a liquid, and from 0.8 to 1.0 grm. of a solid fat being used, which is dissolved in 10 c.c. chloroform and treated with 20 c.c. mercury iodo-chloride solution run into it from a burette, if the liquid appear opalescent a further measure of chloroform is introduced, while the amount of mercury iodo-chloride must be such as to produce a brownish coloration of the chloroform for two subsequent hours. The excess of iodine is determined, on addition of from 10 to 15 c.c. potassium iodide solution and 150 c.c. distilled ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... in gala colors. Over its inaccessible peaks the opalescent fog settles like a snowy veil on the ...
— The Underdogs • Mariano Azuela
... opalescent light. It was dazzling, blinding. Within in it the goggled figure of Molo was moving, adjusting the contacts. He stooped. He straightened, ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... like some weft of opalescent mist, the sweet mirage melted in the noonday. What I then saw I will leave to be told hereafter; but it was not what I ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... full effects of light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare and dust of the day—the effect so matchlessly given in Gray's "Elegy"—seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... twelve-foot gap between cliffs six hundred feet high, was a sight worth going twice that distance, running twice that risk, to see—a rose-red temple front, carved out of the solid valley wall and glistening in the opalescent hues of morning. ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... then with Mrs. Hattie and her daughter. These two ladies, also, were pictures of radiant loveliness—especially were they radiant, for every beam of light found an answering flash in the shimmering iridescence of their beads and jewels and opalescent sequins. ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... horns of the land, a bay opening north-west upon the Atlantic, with a small island in the midst of the expanse, a heap of sundered granite lying upon the horizon like a faint sunken cloud, like the floating body of a whale, like an area of opalescent haze, like an inexplicable brightness at sea when no island can be seen. The apparition of that island depends upon the favour of the sun. The island is only a ghost there, sometimes invisible, sometimes but an alluring and immaterial fragment of the coast we see far over the sea in dreams; ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... the darkness above me, where, like gigantic spiders, the big chandeliers rotated slowly, hanging from the ceiling. Only one of them was lit, and its Murano-glass pendants, its carnations and roses, shone opalescent in the light of the guttering wax. This chandelier lighted up the opposite wall and that piece of ceiling with the goddess and the green peacock; it illumined, but far less well, a corner of the huge room, where, in the shadow of a kind of canopy, a little group of people were crowding round a yellow ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... Bombay is a memory of the June-like temperature (in December), the lovely drives, and the never-ending panorama of the water front as seen from my hotel windows, sometimes dazzlingly bright in the sunlight, and again subdued, as the soft opalescent tints of the twilight enveloped the landscape in a shadowy haze. Before me lay ocean steamers, merchantmen, a man of war, yachts, and many smaller vessels, with rowboats of diverse pattern; to the left was the pier, while ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... upon which golden dragons writhed and crawled. A thick carpet of black covered every inch of visible floor space, a black silk canopy hid the ceiling, and all the room was in deep shadow save the space immediately beneath a great lamp of opalescent ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... gown she flitted among the trees. The autumn afternoon was now far advanced. The shadows of approaching night were already falling across the Pass. The golden glow that tinged the distant snow-clad peaks grew deeper in color. The lights were rapidly fading to beautiful opalescent hues. ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... shake, while threads are extended along the way to be followed. The whole work resolves itself into a delicate veil which swallows up the scattered family. We then see an exquisite nebula against whose opalescent tapestry the tiny animals gleam ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... the row of cabins at her back, she could watch in a dry windlessness the jovial riot of the seas. Now the steamer would stagger to some cross-blow of the waves; now, making a friend of them, swerved into a trough of opalescent green, and emerged again to take, like some fine-spirited horse, the liquid fence, flecked with bubbles, that lay in its course. The wind that had raised this gale still blew from the westward, and on the undefended deck great parcels of water, cut off from their seas, ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... vassalship," the Lady Eloisa said with hesitation—yet eager to know more of her companion's attitude toward the Queen; they had wandered far down the terrace to the basin where the swans were floating, opalescent in ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... with its vast expanse of plain and horizon, its rugged sierras, its wild desolate mesas and solitary peaks of half-decayed mountains—its tawny stretches of desert marked with the occasional skeletons of animal and human remains—its golden wealth of sunshine and opalescent skies, and have felt the brooding death-like silence which seems to hold as in a spell all things living as well as dead, this land becomes one of mystery and enchantment—a mute witness of some unknown or forgotten past ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... Pelz came down with crashing fist that shattered an opalescent wine-glass and sent a great stain ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... save what actual experience has taught us!—this is precisely what she did not do. When the horrible apparition first rose in her very face, as it were, a momentary weakness caught her and she clung to the sash for support. Then the wonderful fire of the malignant eyes, green, serpentine, opalescent, with the wave-like flux of a glowworm's light seen under a glass, riveted her attention. She had ceased to tremble. Our fear of death varies with our desire for life. Dulled by a great grief, she did not so very much care what became of her. The future's burden ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... people about town. The strollers had gone back to town, or down the hill to their dinners. The Terrace, and the gardens that dropped below it to the Thames, were bathed in the purplish opalescent shades of evening. From the windows of the Roebuck streamed a shaft of light, playing on the trunks of the great trees, and gleaming the breadth of the graveled walk. It shone full on Nevill and his companions, and it revealed a woman coming along the Terrace from the direction of ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... What gracious form Will fly the errand of our love to thee, By ways with winged messengers aswarm Through dawn of opalescent skies, To say the time is come and bid thee rise And be our ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... lean wistfully over the gate, there runs a stone wall topped by a green hedge; and on the right, first furrows of pale fawn, then below, furrows of deeper brown, and mulberry, and red ploughed earth stretching down to waving fields of green, and thence to the sea, grey, misty, opalescent, melting into the pearly white clouds, so that one cannot tell where ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... been hours or seconds, she seemed to gather into herself again, but could not wrench her eyes from the crystal ball, which looked opalescent now, and filmy, so that she shaded her eyes mechanically with the black scarf of her dinner-dress, to shut out the reflections of the room. But they were not reflections, for there was bright blue in the ball, blue and white, and nothing of that ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... woods lay glowing under the cloudy autumn sky like a heap of live coals, the maples still quivering in scarlet, the chestnuts sunk into a clear yellow flame, the oaks, parched by the September heat, burnt out into rusty browns. Above them, the opalescent haze of October rose like a faint blue smoke, but within the woods the subdued light was richly colored, like that which passes through the stained glass of a great cathedral. The first of the fallen leaves lay in pools of gold in ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... has followed me since I threw milk into that Hindu's eyes, I should like to describe the many fascinating spots encountered in the embrace of a squalid and picturesque degeneracy.... I should linger with my brush over the opalescent lake and the sweet, calm repose of Seranagur with its purling river scouring the festooned landings and retiring abodes of tranquillity and ease,—I should like to jot down the scenes of bathers at their twilight dips when both sexes mingle as innocent as our ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... pale Monte Sfiorito, the frowning Gnisi, the smiling uplands westward. There were always the sky, the clouds, the clear sunshine, the crisp-etched shadows; and in the afternoon there was always the wondrous opalescent haze of August, filling every distance. There was always his garden—there were the great trees, with the light sifting through high spaces of feathery green; there were the flowers, the birds, the bees, the butterflies, with their colour, ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... thousand five hundred feet high, from whose summit one of the finest views of all southern Europe is attained. The Gulf of Gaeta, the valley of San Germano, the wild and romantic mountain region of the Abruzzi and a view, too, of the blue sea are in the panorama, bathed in the opalescent, gleaming lights that often invest the Italian landscape ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... up and down the street, and then at the balcony which stood out against the opalescent sky, the tracery of ironwork showing like delicate etching on ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... inlaid, and the windows, which are of opalescent glass, throw over the structure a soft white light, admitting of the perfect harmony of colours which everywhere adorn this ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... him for about an hour, but did not weary him into dropping off to sleep. They seemed to have the contrary effect, making him irritable; and though he made up his mind to watch the stars peer out through the opalescent sky—he did not call it opalescent, for the simple word dusky took its place—even their soft light had no effect upon him, and to come to the result at once the would-be sleeper gave it up at last ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... An opalescent mist was in the air, and everywhere, on every swell, the settlers could be seen moving silently to and fro with their teams, while the women sang at their work about the small shanties, and in their new gardens. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... had been reduced to ash, and what seemed like several gallons of coffee had sloshed their way into Malone's interior workings, his mind was as blank as a baby's. The lovely, opalescent dawn began to show in the East, and Malone tendered it some extremely rude words. Then, Haggard, red-eyed, confused, violently angry, and not one inch closer to a solution, he fell into a ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... lumber-room of the mind. In a quiet firelit hour one must draw near, and scrutinise them afresh, and ask oneself what remains. As I write, I open the door of my treasury and look round. What comes up before me? I see an opalescent sky, and the great soft blue rollers of a sapphire sea. I am journeying, it seems, in no mortal boat, though it was a commonplace vessel enough at the time, twenty years ago, and singularly destitute of bodily provision. What is ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of dilute phenolsulphonic acid and dilute formaldehyde (concentrations as above) are gradually mixed in the cold, whilst stirring, the mixture soon becomes opalescent, and a flocculent deposit separates after eighteen ...
— Synthetic Tannins • Georg Grasser
... answered the boy, grinning. The little cage sank swiftly; floor after floor seemed to be rising with marvellous speed; the whole building was winging straight into the sky. There were soaring lights, figures and the opalescent glow of ground glass doors marked with black inscriptions. Other lifts were springing heavenward. All the lofty corridors rang with cries. " Up! " Down! " " Down! " " Up! " The boy's hand grasped a lever and his machine ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... of men were drinking opalescent liquids that looked like precious stones dissolved ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... room rose, high, domed, vaulted above his head, whitish opalescent, washed with green. For a moment, while his eyes adjusted to the light, he wondered how the ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... magnificent dome, and the slender grace of Giotto's Campanile, and thence, from those storied trophies of transcendant art, her gaze wandered to the rich valley of the Arno, with its slopes of green and grey, and its distant line of purple peaks against an opalescent sky. ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... stark immobility, staring with startled eyes at the base of a rocky crag thirty yards away. Something was lurking there in the green-black shadows—a great sprawling black shape of abysmal horror, with a single flaming opalescent eye ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... flashed through the mind of the older woman that the girl's body was like a transparent vase filled to its crystal brim with the wine of joy and life. To tell the news of Hannaford's death would be to pour into the vase a dark liquid, and cloud the opalescent wine. Still, Mary must be told, and it would be better, safer, for her to know before she opened the letter with the Italian postmark; otherwise something written there might come upon her with a shock. Rose and her husband glanced at one another. ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... cliff, beetling far over the mist-filled valley below. A slant of sunshine fell on the surging vapor, and it gleamed opalescent. There was the niche, with the lilies all a-bloom. He came panting up the slope under the dripping trees, with a dash of wind in his face and the odor of damp leafage and mold on the ...
— A Chilhowee Lily - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... summer. The horizontal rays from the west lie in yellow sheaves across the vapours that the day's heat has drawn from the sweating soil. Sour grasses grow in places, and strange fishy smells, now warm, now cold, pass along. Brass-hued and opalescent bubbles, compounded of many gases, rise where passing feet have trodden the damper spots. At night the place is the ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... to make a solution marking 33 deg. to 35 deg. Baume. Distilled or rain water should be used, as the calcareous salts contained in ordinary water would produce insoluble salts of lime, which would render the solution turbid and opalescent; this solution contains silica and potash combined together in the proportion of 70 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... too late, for Molly had picked up a Portuguese man-o'-war and sat wringing her hands with the pain of its poison. For, while nothing in nature is more exquisite, few things are more virulent than this animated, opalescent, iridescent bubble with its long, delicate, ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock
... road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs of the negro children paddling in the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that I found the water of many streamlets and brooks throughout the western mountains of Mexico to have a slightly whitish colour and a dull, opalescent look, like a strong solution of quinine. The Mexicans call it agua blanca, or agua zarca, and consider it the best water they have. Many places, especially ranches, are named after it. In the locality where we now found ourselves ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... which proved, on subsequent inspection, to be largely composed of an impure labradorite. Labradorite, the reader may know, is a crystallized feldspar, with traces of other minerals. In its pure state it is opalescent, exhibiting vivid gleams of blue, green, gold, and copper-color, and, more rarely, of rose,—and is then, and deservedly, reckoned a precious stone. The general character of the rock here is sienitic; but, besides this peculiar quality of feldspar, the hornblende appears as actinolite, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... with yellow. He had wanted to use dahlias in their many rich shades from pale yellow to orange and deep red, but Monty held out for orchids. It was the artist, too, who had found in a rare and happy moment the massive gold candelabra—ancient things of a more luxurious age—and their opalescent shades. Against his advice the service, too, was of gold,—"rank vulgarity," he called it, with its rich meaningless ornamentation. But here Monty was obdurate. He insisted that he liked the color and that porcelain had no character. Mrs. Dan only prevented a quarrel ...
— Brewster's Millions • George Barr McCutcheon
... project it was for a clockmaker, I can tell you," went on McPhearson. "Well, at last the clock was made and the scale of its dimensions sounded like a page from Gulliver's Travels. Each of the dials was of opalescent glass set in a framework of iron and was twenty-two feet or more in diameter. The figures that indicated the hours were two feet long and the minute spaces a foot square. Three sets of works were ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... morning dawned with all the strange half mystical glow of light and colour common to the Italian sky,—flushes of pink warmed the gray clouds, and dazzling, opalescent lines of blue suggested the sun without declaring it,—and Sylvie Hermenstein, who had passed a restless and wakeful night, rose early to go on one of what her society friends called her "eccentric" walks abroad, before the full life of the city was up and stirring. She, who seemed by her ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... into the shimmer of the sky at the horizon, and then it was no longer water and blue heavens; the little craft seemed to be poised in a vast crystalline sphere, where there was neither height nor depth—poised motionless in warm, coruscating, opalescent space, alone ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... in a deck chair, on top of the broad wall of the dock, a cool dawn breeze playing over him. He looked across the motley sea toward an opalescent sky reddening in ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... glowed as if set suddenly on fire. This was immediately dimmed by turning the Nicol through an angle of 90 deg.. It was not the stoppage of the light of the sky behind the mountains alone which produced this startling effect; the air between them and me was highly opalescent, and the quenching of this intermediate glare augmented remarkably ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the opalescent lights were beginning to show in the sky, and their reflection in the water, as he stooped his tall head to enter the covered gondola. It was all too beautiful and wonderful to take in at once, and then he only wanted wings the sooner to arrive, not eyes to see the ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... palace into charming reflections of her own personality. A woman of wide sympathies and cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent social sea that she ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the stars the Lord has scattered Bountifully on the sky, Some soul thought they there were spattered For an ornamental dye; The huge Opalescent Concave Wore the polish of a stone Which the fracturing fires engrave With a thunder-splitting tone; And the things they claimed as sponsors For the young religious thought Were the things that were the monsters Recently from chaos brought. Then the tree inlaced ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... and got so far and fast aground that it required all ten men to get her off, the other crews walking in the water to where we were, as the shoal was very wide. While thus engaged a beautiful colour effect developed softly before us through an opalescent, vaporous shroud. The sun came forth with brilliant power upon the retreating mists creating a clear, luminous, prismatic bow ahead of us arching in perfect symmetry from foot to foot of the glistening walls, while high above it resting each end on the first terraces a second one equally ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... scene of the disaster lay a mile or two past the house in which I was born, and by the time at which I reached this point I could see that the tale was true. It was a perfectly still and windless evening with an opalescent sky, and far away I could see a great column of smoke rising like the stem of a giant mushroom and over it a canopy of smoke like the mushroom's top, and as I drew near I could see that the lower part of the column was faintly irradiated by the flames at the bottom of the pit shaft. The ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... disappeared behind the big purple mountains and even the warm afterglow in the eastern sky had faded into a pearly opalescent gray when the two reached the edge of the bluff ...
— The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail • Ralph Connor
... came up. And as the three tall white figures sped, with soundless tread, through the opalescent light, they appeared like specters flying from hateful shadows. Suddenly, in the air before them, not farther up than a low hill-top flared a lambent flame; as they looked at it, the apparition contracted into a focus of dazzling ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... and hiding its muddy banks which, revealed, had their own opalescent beauty, went its way between the cliffs, clothed on one hand with trees, save for a big red and yellow gash where the stone was being quarried, and on the other with bare rock, topped by the Downs spreading far out of sight. Landwards the river was trapped into docks, spanned ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... apparatus for varying the available amount of it, and for permitting the maximum range in ease and rapidity of its utilization. The thyroid is still another device of life for procuring more and more variation and differentiation, its goal, as far as we can peer through the opalescent screen upon which its ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... fortune flouted her! Why had she let it, like water, escape through her jewelled, indifferent fingers! He made no inquiries. She vouchsafed none. They were now on a different footing. Tantalizingly she dangled the purse under his nose as he brought her absinthe—always this opalescent absinthe. She drank it in the morning, in the afternoon, at night. She seldom spoke save to Ambroise. And he—he no longer saw scarlet, for the glorious tone of her hat and gown had vanished. They were rusty red, a carroty tint. Her face was ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... there is in the stone blade the curious fact of a people which had attained to so complex a design and such an elaborate ornamentation remaining in the Stone-age; and, somewhat curiously, the locality of that stone blade is fixed, by its being of that semi-transparent opalescent calcedony which Humboldt describes as occurring in the volcanic districts of Mexico—the concretionary silex ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... very slowly saccharified, and on cooling deposits crystalline plates of starch. For the determination of starch in barley the finely-ground sample is boiled for three-quarters of an hour with about thirty times its weight of a one per cent solution of salicylic acid, the resulting colorless opalescent liquid filtered with the aid of suction, and the starch therein inverted by means of hydrochloric acid. The dextrose formed is estimated by Fehling's solution. The results are one to two per cent ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... Through the tall windows on the left sunlight was streaming in, touching the steamy vapors with opalescent tints of soft pinks and grayish blues. Charles went from window to window, letting down the heavy canvas awnings. Then he crossed to the shady side to open the ventilators. He was applauded by cries and hand clapping and a rough sort of ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... sun has burned all Egypt, the white man looks eagerly each day for evening, whose rose-coloured veil melts opalescent into the dun drift, of the hills, and iridescent above, into the slowly deepening blue. Pierson stood gazing at the mystery of the desert from under the little group of palms and bougainvillea which formed the garden of the hospital. Even-song ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... both the Atlantic breakers roll in with the boom of northern seas, and under a misty northern sky. It is one of the surprises of Morocco to find the familiar African pictures bathed in this unfamiliar haze. Even the fierce midday sun does not wholly dispel it—the air remains thick, opalescent, like water slightly clouded by milk. One is tempted to say that Morocco is Tunisia seen ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... was glad of the white skin, that was a gift from Mamma. The white coral string, against the satin softness of her throat, revealed its opalescent flush. She was immaculate, exquisite, like some figurine of fancy—an image of youth as sweet and innocently troubling ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... low chair at some distance from her. He had brought her a large bunch of early violets, for he knew that she was fond of flowers, and these lay upon her lap, against the opalescent ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... see a necklace of opalescent jewels gathering about his neck; he tore at it and the phosphorescent water gleamed all about him with feathery pendants. And when his head thrust above water, the moment's respite had allowed the skiff to straggle beyond ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... the dust-cloud cleared. One figure struggled insanely. Upon him descended—from an oil drum of cylinder-oil stored above the rafters—a tranquil, glistening rod of opalescent cylinder-oil. His last bullet had punctured the drum. Oil turned the bone-black upon him into a thick, sticky goo which instantly gathered more bone-black to become thicker, stickier, and gooier. He fought it, while his unconscious ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... shown a painting giving a view of Central Park from the Plaza Hotel, New York, under a heavy fall of snow, in the late afternoon, when the daylight still lingered, although the electric lights had begun to spangle the scene. The prevailing tone was a delicate, opalescent white, shading from blue to mauve, and we were told that one of our leading decorators intended to hang it in a blue room which he was furnishing ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... arose and drew an opalescent dressing grown of brown and blue over his slim pleasant figure. With a last yawn he went into the bathroom, and turning on the dresser light (the bathroom had no outside exposure) he contemplated himself in the mirror with some interest. A wretched apparition, he thought; he usually thought ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... child- hood when, having found a knob of glass, twisted, striated with different colors, and filled with air bubbles, I enjoyed looking at the landscape through it. Everything became grotesquely transfigured. A cabbage in the foreground became opalescent, and an ear of corn a mass of jewels, but the whole atmosphere above and beyond was lurid, and the chimneys and church spires ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... remarkable looking to the full as his daughter, with the same luminously green eyes. But the orbs which in the maid shone as steadily clear as the depths of the sea, in the father glittered opalescent where he sat in the dusk, like the eyes of Grimalkin cornered by dogs in some gloomy angle of the ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... classic principles of taste. He is the French Correggio in far more precise parallelism than Lesueur is the French Raphael. With a grace and lambent color all his own—a beautiful mother-of-pearl and opalescent tone underlying his exquisite violets and graver hues; a color-scheme, on the one hand, and a sense of design in line and mass more suave and graceful than anything since the great Italians, on the other—he recalls the lovely chiaro-oscuro of the exquisite Parmesan as it is recalled ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... with the smoke of burning leaves and the mountains are lost in the haze; when the unshaven cornfields are dotted with yellow pumpkins and under low-branched trees the apples lie in heaps; when the leaves are aflame and the round sun shines pink through opalescent clouds. ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... lost souls who hide in the hills gathered for their besotted revelry. And now, last of all, before the return to thraldom, there was this little shack, anchored on the windy crest of the Divide, a little black dot against the flaming sunsets, a scented sea of cornland bathed in opalescent air and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... sea. David's shoulder was against her knee, his pipe had gone out, and he was looking with lazy eyes at the slipping sparkle of sunshine on the scarcely perceptible waves; sometimes he lifted his marine glasses to follow a sail gleaming like a white wing against the opalescent east. ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... felt assured he would promise concerning his future, when he learned the severity of the ordeal which she had endured in his behalf, blotted out the costliness of the accomplishment. Like that glorious violet haze of Indian Summer, which was drawing its opalescent drapery along the vanishing iron railway track blackened with cinders, and softly shrouding the grim outlines of wreck, that told where a vessel had foundered on the lake in the early autumn gale, an overruling Providence seemed shedding peace even upon her ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... white hands, with their oval nails polished and opalescent, were exceedingly beautiful; and, where the creamy foam of the fine lace fell back from the dimpled wrists, quaintly carved jet serpents with blazing diamond eyes coiled around the throbbing thread-like ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... Pauline enthralled Baskinelli. He had never before seen a woman like her—innocent but astute, daring but demure, brilliant but opalescent. When at last they strolled away together into the conservatory his drawing room obeisances became direct ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... about 8 A.M. For the three hours following I was left to thrash about the room and work myself into a frenzy. I made up my mind to compel attention. A month earlier, shattered glass had enabled me to accomplish a certain sane purpose. Again this day it served me. The opalescent half-globe on the ceiling seemed to be the most vulnerable point for attack. How to reach and smash it was the next question—and soon answered. Taking off my shoes, I threw one with great force at my glass target and succeeded in ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... The luminosity comes from the cluster of eggs forced out of the ovary. Besides, as laying-time approaches, the phosphorescence of the eggs is already made manifest without this clumsy midwifery. A soft opalescent light shines through the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... through it. The immediate vicinity became impregnated with a violent odor of nicotine. The White Chief, however, musing close by on the steps, seemed not to notice it. His eyes were fixed on three Indian canoes being paddled in from the lagoon across the bay which was now taking on the opalescent tints of the late ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... ever changing the exquisite background of our islet. The phosphoric candles of the fireflies began to twinkle here and there, shining brightly against the black trunks of the trees, and lost again on the silvery background of opalescent evening sky. But in a few minutes more thousands of these living sparks, precursors of Queen Night, played round us, pouring like a golden cascade over the trees, and dancing in the air above the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... I dote upon it. It is so pliable, so dreamy, and so opalescent that I can scarce restrain my enthusiasm. But if I should fit one of my boys out with the equipment necessary for a blacksmith, and then he should become a preacher, I'd find the situation embarrassing. My reputation as a prophet would certainly decline. If I could know that ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... carriage, the sheer vulgarity of her choice of words and phrases—these things seized him as a nightmare. Like a man who rushes to a cafe for a drink in a moment of exhaustion, he hastened along towards the National Gallery. His nerves were all quivering. An opalescent light in the sky above Charing Cross soothed him for a moment. A glimpse into a famous art shop was like a cool draught of water. Then, as he walked along in more leisurely fashion, the great idea came to him. He stopped short upon the pavement. ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a particularly vile place to raid to-day, and as I listened with sick heart to the report of it, suddenly I saw the Canyon and F.'s broad back on his mule and the glorious line of the rim lifting from opalescent ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... translucency, semiopacity; opalescence, milkiness, pearliness^; gauze, muslin; film; mica, mother-of-pearl, nacre; mist &c (cloud) 353. [opalescent jewel] opal. turbidity &c 426.1. Adj. semitransparent, translucent, semipellucid^, semidiaphanous^, semiopacous^, semiopaque; opalescent, opaline^; pearly, milky; frosted, nacreous. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget |
