"Lacing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not to be so easily placated. "You mean for Split, don't you?" she said, scarcely looking at him, and diligently lacing her shoe. "She asked you to come, you ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... exaggerate the width of the shoulders and the hips; and those whose figures possess that stateliness which is called stoutness by the vulgar, convert what is a quality into a defect by yielding to the silly edicts of Fashion on the subject of tight-lacing. The fashionable English waist, also, is not merely far too small, and consequently quite out of proportion to the rest of the figure, but it is worn far too low down. I use the expression 'worn' advisedly, for a waist ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... but nearly everyone seemed to be asking for recipes to promote the growth of the eyelashes or to prevent embonpoint. Not one she chanced on said, "A red nose in a girl is generally caused by indigestion or tight-lacing." She asked Aldith to suggest something, and that young person thought that vaseline and sulphur mixed together, and spread over the afflicted member, would have the desired effect. So every night Meg fastened her bedroom door with a wedge of wood, keys being unknown luxuries at Misrule, and ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... said above about midriff and rib breathing versus collar-bone breathing, the folly of tight-lacing, or, indeed, of in any way interfering with the freedom of the waist, will be at once apparent. We pride ourselves upon our civilization; we make a boast of living in the age of science; physiology is now taught, or at least talked of, in almost every school; the laws of health ...
— The Mechanism of the Human Voice • Emil Behnke
... them have got nervous diseases and all sorts of things wrong with them from over-much tea and tight lacing," replied Errington, "and the few who are tolerably healthy are too bouncing by half, going in for hunting and such-like amusements till they grow blowsy and fat, and coarse as tom-boys or grooms. They can never hit the juste milieu. Well!" and he rose from the breakfast-table. ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... gone in for uncomfortable trips. The camps and hotels in the Adirondacks were as warm and luxurious as Carley's own home. Carley now missed many things. And assuredly her flesh was weak. It cost her effort of will and real pain to finish lacing her boots. As she had made an engagement with Glenn to visit his cabin, she had donned an outdoor suit. She wondered if the cold had anything to do with the perceptible diminishing of the sound of the waterfall. Perhaps some of the water had ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... that tight lacing is a public benefit; for it kills off the foolish girls, and leaves the wise ones for good ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... drawn in again with an extra pull or two from the indefatigable Enriquez, I fancied that Chu Chu nevertheless secretly enjoyed it, as her sex is said to appreciate tight-lacing. She drew a deep sigh, possibly of satisfaction, turned her neck, and apparently tried to glance at her own figure—Enriquez promptly withdrawing to enable her to do so easily. Then the dread moment arrived. Enriquez, with his hand on her mane, suddenly paused and, with ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... morning, puzzled at first by the added light that filled the room. Then, when the truth at last fully dawned on us and we knew that snow-balling was no longer a wistful dream, but a solid certainty waiting for us outside, it was a mere brute fight for the necessary clothes, and the lacing of boots seemed a clumsy invention, and the buttoning of coats an unduly tedious form of fastening, with all that snow going to waste ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... Wellhausen puts it of the virtuosi of religion. If he put on his right stocking (or rather foot lappet, for he did not wear stockings) first, he made amends by putting on the left boot first, and if he had lace-up boots, then the boot put on second would have a compensatory precedence in the lacing. Thus was the divine principle of justice symbolized ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... miscellanies as wrinkled apples, dusty nuts, cracked slate pencils and fly-blown mock jewellery. The moral good which you derive, in the first pane of a window, from the contemplation of memoirs of murdered missionaries and serious tracts against intemperance and tight-lacing, you lose in the second, before such worldly temptations as gingerbread, shirt-studs, and fascinating white hats for Sunday wear, at two and ninepence apiece. Let no man rashly say he has seen all that British enterprise can do for the extension of British commerce, until he has carefully ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... hoop-skirts he has all along set his face, and seldom, if ever, condescends to delineate a lady in crinoline. His beau-ideal of female beauty is comprised in an hour-glass waist, a skirt that fits close to the form, a sandalled shoe, and very long ringlets; whereas tight lacing, narrow skirts, sandalled shoes, and ringlets have been banished from the English modes any time these fifteen years. Those among George's critics, too, who are sticklers for exactitude in the "abstract and brief chronicle of the time" complain that his dandies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... steer until you buy it in the form of shoes. Think where that steer was raised, and where the leather was tanned. Think of all the men engaged in the industry from the cow-punchers to the salesmen in the stores. But there is more than leather involved in shoes. There is cotton in the shoe lacing and lining. There is metal in the nails and eyelets. Not only must different localities cooeperate to produce a shoe; but various industries ...
— Fundamentals of Prosperity - What They Are and Whence They Come • Roger W. Babson
... reason's intellectual sway, These barriers are bound to disappear, And leave the path to progress free and clear. The dogmatism of fashion too is crime, When injuring the human form sublime, By its stern mandates, which attract the weak, Causing them nature's holiest laws to break, By lacing tightly, to a model form, Which fashion sternly says should then be worn; This tightening in the vital organs so, Prevents the circulation's healthy flow, And thus the lungs and pliant ribs and heart, Incapable of acting out the part Assigned to them by nature, prove a prey To premature ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... but the width remains the same throughout their entire length. The planes are double surfaced with silk and laced above and below the bamboo ribs which run fore and aft under the main spars and terminate in a forked clip through which a wire is strung for lacing on the silk. The tail consists of a horizontal and vertical surface placed on a universal joint about 10 feet back of the rear edge of the main plane. Both of these surfaces are flat and consist of a silk covering stretched upon bamboo ribs. The horizontal surface ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... joined in this chorus. She had emitted a series of grunts—no less primitive word expressing her vocal emissions when disgusted. She now had four chins, her eyes were alarmingly protuberant, and her face, what with the tight lacing in vogue, much good food and wine, and a pious disapproval of powder or any care of a complexion which should remain as God made it, was of a deep mahogany tint; but her hand still held the iron rod, and if its veins had risen its muscles ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... dozen people hovering nigh. The hush of twilight is over the beautiful old Point. The moist breath of the coming night, cool and sweet, floats down upon them from the deep gorges on the rugged flank of Cro' Nest, and rises from the thickly lacing branches of the cedars on the river-bank below. A flawless mirror in its grand and reflected framework of cliff and crag and beetling precipice, the Hudson stretches away northward unruffled by ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... there two minutes when she found that Harriet's habits of dependence and imitation were bringing her up too, and that, in short, they would both be soon after her. This would not do; she immediately stopped, under pretence of having some alteration to make in the lacing of her half-boot, and stooping down in complete occupation of the footpath, begged them to have the goodness to walk on, and she would follow in half a minute. They did as they were desired; and by the time she judged it reasonable to have done with her boot, she had the ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... beautiful. The idea of Brenda not believing in supernatural agency, and yet being afraid, and Minna not being afraid though she believes in Norma's power, is new and natural and ingenious. This was Joanna Baillie's idea. The picture of the sisters sleeping and the lacing scene is excellent, and there are not only passages of beautiful picturesque description, but many more deep philosophical reflections upon the human mind, and the causes of human happiness, than in any of his other works. The satire upon agriculturists ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... toilet of a nicely-adjusted kind—of a nature between the carefully neat and the carelessly ornate—of a degree between fine-market-day and wet-Sunday selection. He thoroughly cleaned his silver watch-chain with whiting, put new lacing straps to his boots, looked to the brass eyelet-holes, went to the inmost heart of the plantation for a new walking-stick, and trimmed it vigorously on his way back; took a new handkerchief from the bottom of his clothes-box, put on the light waistcoat patterned ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... is fat and fair and prosperous: she overflows with good spirits; she has a waist which defies tight-lacing, and she dances joyously on large flat feet. Miss Darnaway (officer's daughter with small means) is the exact opposite of Miss Plym. She is thin and tall and faded—poor soul. Destiny has made it ...
— I Say No • Wilkie Collins
... handsomely sets off a handsome man; it may cost some pain in the beginning, but I doubt if it be near so painful in the long-run, and I am sure it is far more becoming than the ignoble European practice of tight-lacing among women. And now it has been found needful to forbid the art. Their songs and dances were numerous (and the law has had to abolish them by the dozen). They now face empty-handed the tedium of their uneventful days; ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... photographs, could be seen in the center. A wondrously slender, yellow-haired young girl clad in Grecian robes of pale blue sat in deep despond upon a plain wooden couch, with a black haired servant kneeling before her, apparently lacing sandals on ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... out of them across the glassy swell. Look at those blasts of delicate vapour that shoot up from hidden rifts, and hang a moment, and vanish; and those green columns of wave which rush mast-high up the perpendicular walls, and then fall back and outward in a waterfall of foam, lacing the black rocks with a thousand snowy streams. There they fall, and leap, and fall again. And so they did yesterday, and the day before; and so they did centuries ago, when the Danes swept past them, battleworn, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... backward in long, speedy trails of foam, lacing the surface of a grey-green waste ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... me ask just here, is the meaning of the small waists that girls are cramming their lives into? I thought tight-lacing was an effete superstition clean gone forever. But again and again, last summer, I saw this wretched disease, this cacoethes pectus vinciendi, breaking out with renewed and increasing virulence; and ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... and besmeared with bismuth. He was even more frightened than at his first appearance, when he was driven by another fear. Ruby Noakes, black-eyed and dashing, winked at him saucily from her perch on the high trapeze, having caught his eye. When she slid down the stout lacing and wafted kisses to the multitude, he was near enough to catch her ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... two or three, each a yard and a half long, tightly wound round their bodies, thus making their waists wider than their hips. One girl was black and blue with the pattern showing on her skin, and many men were suffering from the evils of tight lacing. ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... whip," said Corks. They could hear the leather-thonged polo-quirt lacing the little fellow's well-rounded barrel. Then The Rabbit's shrill neigh came across ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... though Duncan might have been warned by the dark red in her cheeks. She continued to work with the saddle, lacing the latigo strings and tightening ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... to beauty than the constrained movement, suffused complexion, and labored respiration that betray tight-lacing. The play of intelligence, and varied emotion, which throw such a charm over the brow of youth, are impeded by whatever obstructs the flow of blood from the heart to its many organs. In Greece, where ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... then there was such a lacing of stays, and tying of sandals, and dressing of hair, as never can take place with a proper degree of bustle out of a boarding-school. The smaller girls managed to be in everybody's way, and were pushed about accordingly; and the elder ones ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... you should know the truth about it, because he said he had never lied to you. He was always sure that if he were shot it would be in the back while he was lacing his boots, or at some other unromantic moment. And in that case he said he could lie to Anonyma and your cousin vicariously through the War Office, which would write to them about Glory, and Duty, and Thanks Due. But he wanted me to write to you, and tell ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... colour. For although its productions are painted poems, they belong to a sort of poetry which tells itself without an articulated story. The master is pre-eminent for the resolution, the ease and quickness, with which he reproduces instantaneous motion—the lacing-on of armour, with the head bent back so stately—the fainting lady—the embrace, rapid as the kiss caught, with death itself, from dying lips—the momentary conjunction of mirrors and polished armour and still water, by which all the sides of a solid image are presented at once, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... assure himself that no horseman followed Winthrop, Overland Red made no sign that might help the other to find the trail over the range. The rim of Winthrop's hat became distinguishable; then the white lacing of his boots. Nearer, Overland saw that his face was drawn and set with ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... shieldes bright, the testers*, and trappures** *helmets Gold-hewen helmets, hauberks, coat-armures; **trappings Lordes in parements* on their coursers, *ornamental garb ; Knightes of retinue, and eke squiers, Nailing the spears, and helmes buckeling, Gniding* of shieldes, with lainers** lacing; *polishing There as need is, they were nothing idle: **lanyards The foamy steeds upon the golden bridle Gnawing, and fast the armourers also With file and hammer pricking to and fro; Yeomen on foot, and knaves* many one *servants With shorte staves, thick* as they may gon**; *close **walk ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... face-downward. The edges of the jacket are brought as nearly together as possible along the centre of the man's back. Then a rope, on the principle of a shoe-lace, is run through the eyelets, and on the principle of a shoe-lacing the man is laced in the canvas. Only he is laced more severely than any person ever laces his shoe. They call it "cinching" in prison lingo. On occasion, when the guards are cruel and vindictive, or when the command has come down from above, in order to insure the severity of the lacing the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... under new carpets. Suddenly, in the middle of her work, on a stuffy-still July day, she called a wind out of the Northwest, a wind blown under an arch of steel-bellied clouds, a wicked bitter wind with a lacing of hail to it, a wind that came and was gone in less than ten minutes, but blocked the roads with fallen trees, toppled over a barn, and—blew potatoes out of the ground! When that was done, a white ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... like to hear. We shall, I hope, bear with each other; For to dispel thy crotchets, brother, As a young lord, I now appear, In scarlet dress, trimmed with gold lacing, A stiff silk cloak with stylish facing, A tall cock's feather in my hat, A long, sharp rapier to defend me, And I advise thee, short and flat, In the same costume to attend me; If thou wouldst, unembarrassed, see What sort of thing this life ...
— Faust • Goethe
... Sais, or On, Memphis, or Thebes, or Pelusium? Fitting them neatly your brown toes upon, Lacing them deftly with finger and thumb, I seem to see you!—so long ago, Twenty-one centuries, less or more! And here are your sandals: yet none of us know What name, or fortune, or ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... these ladies here would sooner be burned alive with dyspepsia or cut in two with tight-lacing," I replied severely. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... that which, from being so strictly forbidden, she concluded must be the greatest possible enjoyment—freedom of word and action. Alas! if we may use a homely phrase, many are the victims to strait-lacing, both of ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... will be on my back," I assured her. "I'll be all right," and I went on lacing the snow-shoe thongs about ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... was bent on the upper leach. The boom was got in under cover of the hurricane-house, and of the bundle of the sail; the out-hauler was bent, the boom, replaced, the sail being hoisted with a little and a hurried lacing, to the luff. This was not effected without a good deal of hazard, though the nearness of the bows of the vessel to the rocks prevented most of the Arabs from perceiving what passed so far aft. Still, others nearer to the shore caught glimpses of the actors, and several ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... Chicago clothes upon the streets of some town. For the most part, however, he wore the rough clothes bought from Ed, and, when these were gone, others like them, with a warm canvas outer jacket, and for rough weather a pair of heavy boots lacing half way up the legs. Among the people, he passed for a rather well-set-up workman with money in his pocket going ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... see a single hopper. That is, they did not until the road dipped before them and they started down into a cupped hollow filled with buildings. The river, whose delta they had earlier seen, made a half loop about the city, lacing it in. And here were no signs of the warfare which ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... dia." Women, too, watched them from windows and doors, and children slyly peeped around corners until something more important—such as a cat, a goat, or a gorgeous butterfly—came their way. Tim went inside and slicked up a bit by buttoning and lacing his clothes and combing his rebellious hair. At length a long boat put out from the farther shore and came surging ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... dim here, and his fingers trembled, so that he took a long time threading the laces through the eyelet-holes. He became aware that his nerves were shaken. At the best of times, with his hurt leg, he found this operation of lacing his boots one of the worst of the day's jobs. It cost him almost as much time as shaving, and ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... fastened together by transverse pieces of wood above. They are so thin that, if heavily laden, they bend with the inequalities of the surface over which they pass. The ordinary dog-sledges are eight or ten feet long and very narrow, but the lading is secured to a lacing round the edges. The cariole used by the traders is merely a covering of leather for the lower part of the body, affixed to the common sledge which is painted and ornamented according to the taste of the proprietor. ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... preventive laws, no less than private tutors and school-masters, should remember, that the readiest way to make either mind or body grow awry, is by lacing it ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... to her that here was the place to stop for dinner. With her slicker spread out on the bank she sat down and had lunch, holding her feet in the water while she ate. Being done she sat a while longer, and when the sun had dried her feet she put on the shoes again, lacing them carefully with particular regard to the ailing instep. Then ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... his rough riding coat by one of broadcloth, with lace ruffles, while the working gowns of the ladies were discarded for others of silk, made, in the parlance of the time, "sack fashion, or without waist, and termed "an elegant negligee,"— this word being applied to any frock without lacing strings. ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... least a dozen women to attend to the comfort of visitors. They are regular Finnish bathing-women, wearing the ordinary uniform of their calling, viz. a thick blue serge skirt, red flannel outside stays, opening at the lacing in front and showing the white cotton chemise that is de rigueur, cut low at the neck and with quite short sleeves, a very pretty simple dress that allows great freedom to the arms when massaging, one of the important ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... his good looks, and his dress not only showed that he was single, but that he hoped to be married soon. He wore brown trousers, which fitted him very well, and a dark-blue shirt, which had a gay lacing of red cord in front, and a pair of suspenders that were a vivid green. On his head he wore a Chinese straw helmet; which was as ugly as anything could conceivably be, but he was as proud of it as he was of his green suspenders. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland |
