|
|
|
More "Corset" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one point, the conversation suddenly took a peculiar turn. It came about through Mrs. Dawes mentioning that her aunt, who died from eating tinned lobster, used to work in a corset shop in Wych Street. When she said that, The Agent, whose right eye appeared to survey the ceiling, whilst his left eye looked over the other side ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... night and you don't even know his name. Funny! If two strange women had found themselves occupying the same room for a night they wouldn't have got to the kimono and back hair stage before they would not only have known each other's name, but they'd have tried on each other's hats, swapped corset cover patterns, found mutual friends living in Dayton, Ohio, taught each other a new Irish crochet stitch, showed their family photographs, told how their married sister's little girl nearly died with swollen glands, and divided off the mirror into two sections to paste their newly ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... for the pencil. He forgot all—his graceful draping, his easy attitudes, his power of representing the passions. As to skilful grouping or dramatic effect in painting, all that was quite out of the question. He had nothing before his eyes but the eternal uniform, corset, or dress-coat—objects chilling to the artist, and affording little scope to imagination. By and by even the most ordinary merits disappeared, one by one, from his productions; and they still enjoyed the highest reputation, though real judges and artists only shrugged their shoulders ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Bartley took care of that. He would never let me wear a corset, and for years he made me do calisthenics under ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... her silken robe, And bind her locks with pearls, And one may wreathe the woodland rose Among her floating curls; And one may tread the dewy grass, And one the marble floor, Nor half-hid bosom heave the less, Nor broidered corset more! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... twenty-one; and in Baltimore, seventeen. Among those organized in Philadelphia were hand-loom weavers, plasterers, bricklayers, black and white smiths, cigar makers, plumbers, and women workers including tailoresses, seamstresses, binders, folders, milliners, corset makers, and mantua workers. Several trades, such as the printers and tailors in New York and the Philadelphia carpenters, which formerly were organized upon the benevolent basis, were now reorganized as ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... the corset is lost in remote antiquity. The figures of the early Egyptian women show clearly an artificial shape of the waist produced by some style of corset. A similar style of dress must also have prevailed ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Custom Orders: Dressing sacques, aprons (kitchen, gingham, and work), gymnasium suits, waists, children's dresses, corset covers, drawers, skirts and chemise, sheets, pillowslips, curtains, straw hats, fancy petticoats, kimonos, handkerchiefs, fancy neckwear, infants' outfits, boys' waists, quilting, hemstitching by yard, ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... constant. Every muscle was almost immovable. I could climb only a few steps without weakening to the stopping-point. I breathed only by gasps, and my heart became violent and feeble by turns. I felt as if cinched in a steel corset. After I had spent ten long minutes and was only half-way up a slope, the entire length of which I had more than once climbed in a few minutes and in fine shape, I turned to retreat, but as there was no cessation of the electrical colic, I faced about and started up again. I reached the ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... wappatoo-roots under the beds. The dress of the men is like that of the people above, but the women are clad in a peculiar manner, the robe not reaching lower than the hip, and the body being covered in cold weather by a sort of corset of fur, curiously plaited and reaching from the arms to the hip; added to this is a sort of petticoat, or rather tissue of white cedar bark, bruised or broken into small strands, and woven into a girdle by several cords of the same material. Being tied round the middle, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... of a spinster. "An unmarried woman," states that worthy work, baldly, "especially when no longer young." That, to the world, was Sophy Decker. Unmarried, certainly. And most certainly no longer young. In figure she was, at fifty, what is known in the corset ads as a "stylish stout." Well dressed in blue serge, with broad-toed health shoes and a small, astute hat. The blue serge was practical common sense. The health shoes were comfort. The hat was strictly business. Sophy Decker made and sold hats, both astute and ingenuous, ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... queen of the ball, for three days and three nights, unrivalled in our young hero's eyes; but on the fourth night, Ormond chancing to praise the fine shape of one of her very dear friends, Miss Darrell whispered, "She owes that fine shape to a finely padded corset. Oh! I am clear of what I tell you—she ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... his comrade called him only Mademoiselle Fifi. This nickname was bestowed upon him on account of his coquettish style of dressing and manners, his slender waist, which looked as if it were laced in a corset, his pale face on which a nascent mustache could hardly be seen, and also on account of the habit he had acquired, in order to express his supreme contempt for persons and things, of using continually the French locution: "Fi! fi donc!" which he pronounced ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... fainting fits:—Place the patient in the "lying down" position and this frequently restores consciousness; loosen any tight clothes, corset, waist, collar, etc. Give plenty of fresh air and do not crowd. Keep quiet yourself; do not get excited. In mild cases, mild stimulants may be necessary. Let the patient smell of camphor, put a cloth with camphor or ammonia near the nose. In other cases amylnitrite and ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... and flounce, a horrible and not dramatic spectacle of abandonment; decencies gone down before desire, the heart ruptured and broken through its walls. In such a moment of soul dishabille and her own dishabille of bosom bulging above the tight lacing of her corset-line as she lay prone, her mouth sagging and wet with tears, her lips blowing outward in bubbles, a picture, in fact, to gloss over, Mae Munroe dragged herself closer, flinging her arms about the knees of Mr. Zincas, sobbing ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists. Good afternoon. Good-by—Zoe"—placing his hands on her curls as ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Jacqueline; "how handsome she is! I should like one of these days to be that kind of beauty, so tall and slender. Her waist measure is only twenty-one and two thirds inches. The woman who makes her corsets and my mamma's told us so. She brought us one of her corsets to look at, a love of a corset, in brocatelle, all over many-colored flowers. That material is much more 'distingue' than ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... preceding. About 1820 was a corset-fitter at No. 14 rue de la Corderie-du-Temple, Paris; employed by Mme. Meynardie. She was also the mistress of Gatien Bourignard. Passionately jealous, she rashly made a scene in the home of Jules Desmarets, her lover's son-in-law. Then she drowned herself, in a fit of despair, and was ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... tuckers at de hem, just a little long, to show good and white 'long wid de blue of de skirt and de red of de underskirt. Dese all come up to my waist and was held together by de string dat held my bustle in place. All dis and my corset was hid by de snow white pleated pique bodice, dat drapped gracefully from my shoulders. 'Round my neck was a string of green jade beads. I wore red stockin's and my foots was stuck in soft, black, ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... clothing the house possessed, a solid funnel of wool and cotton that obliterated every sign of sex and made it impossible to image the existence of a fleshy reality beneath the bulk of cloth. Rows of filigree buttons glittered on the cuffs of her jacket; on her breast, crushed flat by a monastic corset which seemed made of iron, shone a triple chain of gold with its enormous links; from beneath the kerchief worn on the head hung her heavy braids tied with ribbons. On the bench, serving as a cushion for ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... recent years the world generally, the medical profession included, held the opinion that there is a fundamental difference between men and women in breathing. Observation of the natural breathing of boys and girls would soon prove the absurdity of this opinion. Owing to the universal use of the corset, thoracic breathing, or chest breathing, the result of the artificial constriction of the body at and below the waist line, appeared to be the natural method of breathing for women, whereas diaphragmatic breathing was recognized as proper and natural for men. Only in recent ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... afraid of nothing so much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... world. She will not place the corpses of cats or birds on her head. She will not wear mops at the bottom of her dress to sweep up the filth of the earth. She will not wear shoes that injure her as the heathen do. She will not put her body in the vice of a corset, displacing the organs of her body, unfitting her to be a mother, causing more than half the surgical operations in the hospitals. She will then discuss character more than fashion. She will be ashamed of her silly, giggling and meaningless ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... exquisite purity. Her education, I grieve to say, had been most shamefully neglected; her mother, though a most exemplary woman, both as a Christian and a member of society, had never tied her up in a fashionable corset to improve her figure, nor sent her to a fashionable boarding school to improve her mind; the consequence was that she knew nothing of the piano,—Virgil seems to have had the gift of prophecy with regard to this part of modern education, ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... finally resolved to achieve her independence. She saw hundreds of men and women sacrificing brilliant careers to go V NAROD, to the people. She followed their example. She became a factory worker; at first employed as a corset maker, and later in the manufacture of gloves. She was now 17 years of age and proud to earn her own living. Had she remained in Russia, she would have probably sooner or later shared the fate of thousands buried in the snows of Siberia. But a new chapter of life was to begin for her. Sister ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... example—in the steel safe of le patron. All except one paper, of the most thrilling importance, which never left her person. This small, unobtrusive paper, upon which, according to Madame, the destinies of nations depended, was hidden always—happy paper—in the bosom of her corset. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... is given over to the tariff. A very indelicate discussion has been had upon corsets. Mr. BROOKS was of opinion that the corset would tariff it were subjected to any more strain in the way of duties. Mr. MARSHALL remarked that the corset avoided a great deal of Waist. It was whalebone of his bone, or something of that sort. It was one of the main Stays ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... animals at play, wild birds singing, and children brought up to colder water than their fathers. It should have been our business to pursue health till we no longer needed the interior of the chemist's shop, the optician's store, the hairdresser's, the corset-maker's, the thousand and one emporiums which patch and prink us, promoting our fancies and disguising the ravages which modern life makes in our figures. Our ambition should have been to need so little that, with our present scientific knowledge, we should have been ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... the moon? Gone. This inferior luminary cannot compete with the corset ad signs and the ice cream ad signs that blaze in the night sky. We stand on a bridge that connects State Street and ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... prepared for. She had put on a gown of her own making,—the secret toil of many a long night,—amateurishly fashioned from some cheap yellow calico the doctor had sent her, yet fitting her wonderfully, and showing every curve of her graceful figure. Unaccented by a corset,—an article she had never known,—even the lines of the stiff, unyielding calico had a fashion that was nymph-like and suited her unfettered limbs. Doctor Ruysdael was profoundly moved. Though a philosopher, he was practical. He found himself ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... would make him remain seated near her by the fire, until twelve o'clock at night, singing soft refrains, and at every opportunity showed her fair shoulders, and the white temptations of which her corset was full, and casting upon him a thousand piercing glances, all without showing in her face the thoughts that surged in ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... has shown me generous love; a Contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday she came in her holiday dress, a beautiful corset of red silk, richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, on the other a pair of live chickens to be eaten by me for her sake ("per amore mio"), and wanted no present, no reward: ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... waited for the first victim. A low, heavily laden lumber wagon, drawn by straining horses, creaked down the street. They concentrated their fire upon the driver by tacit consent, for each of the marksmen had had an aversion to causing runaways drilled into him by the hair brush or corset steel method. ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... resumed her ordinary calico gown, but such was the impression left upon Renshaw's fancy that she seemed to wear it with a new grace. At any other time he might have recognized the change as due to a new corset, which strict veracity compels me to record Rosey had adopted for the first time that morning. Howbeit, her slight coquetry seemed to have passed, for she closed the open trunk with a return of her old listless air, and sitting on it rested her elbows on her knees and her ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... the house she plunged and found the shoes. Seeing the house still standing, she thought of other things she might need, grasped her tooth brushes and thrust them in her corset. She would certainly need a comb. She added that—a powder bag and lace collar lying on the bureau were also saved. Her hair was tumbling down. She thought of hairpins and tucking comb ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... was badly cut. Instead of holding himself upright with an elastic corset, he felt that he was cooped up inside a hideous shirt-collar; he hung his dejected head without resistance on the part of a limp cravat. What woman could guess that a handsome foot was hidden by the clumsy boots ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... had fallen over some stumps. Instantly they saw that she had been prostrated by the heat, and having recently studied "First aid to the injured" they proceeded to remove her blouse and open her corset, when lo! there upon a silver chain around her neck was not only Ethel Hollister's ring but another belonging to Honora Casey. She had missed it a few days after Ethel had lost hers, but she wisely refrained from speaking of it to anyone but Patty Sands, adding, "Shure, ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... made up and had his long mustaches and elf-locked Macbeth wig on—and his corset too. I could tell by the way his waist was sucked in before he saw me. But instead of dark kilts and that bronze-studded sweat-stained leather battle harness that lets him show off his beefy shoulders and the top half of his heavily furred chest—and which really ...
— No Great Magic • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... bedchamber. In the old royal days before the downfall of her kingdom she had accorded it to greater than Lydia French. Lydia's breath came so fast now that it hurt her. She stepped forward, but she did not take the low chair which really had quite a comfortable area left beyond Madame Beattie's corset and stockings. She stood there in the circle of light and ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... a regulation verse-form as a kind of corset which does not much disguise a good figure, though it certainly hampers it, and which is a great help to a poor figure. It covers up deficiencies, and it restrains exuberances. A personality like Whitman can wear it with ease and grace, as may be ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... the ugly fashions of that London town, clumsy copies of Parisian cockneydom, into thy Highland home; nor give up the healthful and graceful, free and modest dress of thy mother and thy mother's mother, to disfigure the little kirk on Sabbath days with crinoline and corset, high-heeled boots, and other ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... two-acre lot for a victim before it stops. She is also provided with a caudal appendage that ends in a patent fly-brush. This she uses to wrap around the neck of the milkmaid to prevent her getting away before she has a chance to kick her health corset off ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... point of view, the beauty of the Velasquez child portraits is greatly injured by the grotesque fashions of the times. A long stiff corset and an immense oval hoop entirely precluded any possibility of grace in the attitude of the little princesses, while a ridiculously artificial style of dressing the hair completed the absurdity of a costume which ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... fortunate. She was unable to satisfy a lady as to the fit of her stays, and this angry customer, whose name was Marie Mansel, gave her so shrewd a blow with her fist that the poor little dressmaker died in a week. The canons apparently so sympathised with the annoyances of a badly fitting corset, that they gave Marie Mansel her freedom. But the episode has its value in showing that the modern muscular female is not so new an apparition as she fancies. Tradesmen did not always get the worst of it, however, in such ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... wife cries out for mercy (No more she wears that fetching jersey); And all in vain she pity claims: The dagger ruthlessly he aims, And through the whale-bone of her corset Tries unsuccessfully to force it. At last he feels that he's succeeded, A little more than p'rhaps was needed. Ah, that by taking out the knife He now could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... by punishments alone. They are eternally tempted to folly, yet snubbed the moment they would be wise. A million shops spread their nets, and entice them by their direst foible. Their very mothers—for want of medical knowledge in the sex—clasp the fatal, idiotic corset on their growing bodies, though thin as a lath. So the girl grows up, crippled in the ribs and lungs by her own mother; and her life, too, is in stays—cabined, cribbed, confined: unless she can paint, or act, or write novels, every path of honorable ambition is closed to her. We ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... relieved. During the last months of the pregnancy there is again frequent urination, because then the heavy uterus sinks again into the pelvic cavity and presses upon the bladder. The treatment for this frequent urination consists in wearing a well fitting abdominal belt or corset, which raises the uterus and prevents pressure on the bladder. Sometimes a pessary which prevents the anteversion is efficient. In all cases lying down and resting is useful. In short, keeping off one's feet is the most efficient remedy for the treatment of frequent ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... hatchings of things domestic, tended whole byrefuls of cows, handled suckling lambs with dead mothers lying up on the hill—aye, played the surgeon even to robins with broken legs, for one of which she constructed a leg capable of being strapped on, made it out of the whalebone of an old corset of her own for which she ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... made of light"—her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming I had ordered champagne—we always drank champagne together, because, as ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... managed to find Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind And be safe in my corset-lacing. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... it that you must do, Roberta, to disguise your roundness of a young woman? All is lost!" I said to myself in despair. Then a thought came to me. I had never been habited in a corset in my life on account of a prejudice entertained to that garment by my Nannette, but I bethought me to remove that shirt and also the silk one underneath and swath about me one of the heavy towels of the bath. Immediately I did so and fastened it in place with a needle and thread from the gentleman's ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... hides his wive's corset and petticoat, it is governin' without the "consent of the governed." And if you don't believe it, you ort to have peeked round them barrells, and seen Abagail's eyes. Why, they had hull reams of by-laws ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... Mr. Bartley took care of that. He would never let me wear a corset, and for years he made me do ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... the transparent whiteness of her cheeks. Over her neck and breast of ivory flowed the golden waves of her magnificent hair, which had come down at the time of her fall. When, as they unlaced her satin corset, less soft, less fresh, less white than the virgin form beneath, which lay like a statue of alabaster in its covering of lace and lawn, one of the horrible hags felt the arms and shoulders of the young ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... shoulders of Lidia Ivanovna jutting out above her corset, and her fine pensive eyes bidding him to her, Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled, revealing untarnished white teeth, and ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... corset squeezing is counteracted by the power of complexion. Woman likes to look like a wasp, and if she could she would move her poor system all out of place for the sake of a ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... etc., that father had brought from Scotland, but no saw excepting a coarse crooked one that was unfit for sawing dry hickory or oak. So I made a fine-tooth saw suitable for my work out of a strip of steel that had formed part of an old-fashioned corset, that cut the hardest wood smoothly. I also made my own bradawls, punches, and a pair of compasses, out of wire and ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... doubt, might name her "somewhat wild;" And pedants, possibly, pronounce her "slow;" Or corset-makers add, that for a child, She needed "cultivation;"—all I know Is that whene'er she spoke, or laughed, or romped, you Felt in each act the beauty ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... up from the white-enameled rocker, tucked in her graceless cotton corset-cover, stared at her image in the mirror, smoothed her neck till ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... invariably wore a corset-cover of yellow flannel, the Baroness a wrapper mottled with stains from cosmetics and the Biscayan lady a red waist through whose opening was regularly presented, for the admiration of those who ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... gate and there is asked what she has done to make the world better, and when she has to confess that she has never done anything outside of her own house, and nothing there except agreeable things, such as entertaining friends who next week will entertain her, and embroidering 'insets' for corset-covers for dainty ladies who already have corset-covers enough to fill a store-window,—I wonder if she will be able to put it over on the heavenly doorkeeper that 'the Doctor would not let her.' If all I hear is true, Saint Peter will say, 'Who is this person you call the Doctor?' ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... a corset which she wore only once a week, walked along erect, with her squeezed-in waist, her broad shoulders and prominent hips, swinging herself a little. She wore a hat trimmed with flowers, made by a milliner at Yvetot, and displayed the back ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... profession included, held the opinion that there is a fundamental difference between men and women in breathing. Observation of the natural breathing of boys and girls would soon prove the absurdity of this opinion. Owing to the universal use of the corset, thoracic breathing, or chest breathing, the result of the artificial constriction of the body at and below the waist line, appeared to be the natural method of breathing for women, whereas diaphragmatic breathing was recognized as proper and natural for men. Only ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... a very stout, jolly-looking woman, and she was standing at the corset counter, holding in her hand an article she was returning. Evidently her attention had been suddenly drawn to the legend printed on the label, for she was overheard to murmur, "'Made expressly for John Wanamaker.' Well, there! No wonder ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... not entirely rid herself of the notion that she was dreaming. A lace petticoat hanging over the back of a chair and a brocaded pink corset over another contributed to the illusion. She could not yet believe they were hers, any more than was the twenty-dollar creation in the hat box on ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... silvered fox-stole from a cock's-feather boa is aware that a silvered fox-stole simply cannot be sold for a guinea. Yet Hugo had announced that he would sell two thousand of them at that price, not to mention muffs to match at the same figure. And there was the famous 'Incroyable' corset, white coutille, with wide belted band round hips, double belt to buckle at sides, cut low—' Enough! Further indiscretions of description are not necessary to show that eighteen and nine is the lowest price at which a reasonable ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... shouldnt have blamed you: I'd have done the same only for Margaret. Too much straightlacedness narrows a man's mind. Talking of that, what about those hygienic corset advertisements that Vines & Jackson want us to put in the window? I told Vines they werent decent and we couldnt shew them in our shop. I was pretty high with him. But what am I to say to him now if he comes and throws ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... hate a man like that! There's no fun in him!" A little abruptly she turned and thrust the photograph into Rae Malgregor's hand. "You can have it if you want to," she said. "I'll trade it to you for that lace corset-cover of yours!" ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... females described in the sixth act is well worthy of our observation. It consisted of a corset of white silk and a fine red upper garment, besides the usual lower dress, ornaments, and a chaplet of flowers. It has received several modifications ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... Millie. Both b'long to Marster Adam and Miss Nellie. Dat was her name and a lovely mistress she be in dat part of de country. Her was sure pretty, walk pretty, and act pretty. 'Bout all I had to do in slavery time was to comb her hair, lace her corset, pull de hem over her hoop and say, 'You is served, mistress!' Her lak them little words at ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... at de hem, just a little long, to show good and white 'long wid de blue of de skirt and de red of de underskirt. Dese all come up to my waist and was held together by de string dat held my bustle in place. All dis and my corset was hid by de snow white pleated pique bodice, dat drapped gracefully from my shoulders. 'Round my neck was a string of green jade beads. I wore red stockin's and my foots was stuck in soft, black, cloth, ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... on me became constant. Every muscle was almost immovable. I could climb only a few steps without weakening to the stopping-point. I breathed only by gasps, and my heart became violent and feeble by turns. I felt as if cinched in a steel corset. After I had spent ten long minutes and was only half-way up a slope, the entire length of which I had more than once climbed in a few minutes and in fine shape, I turned to retreat, but as there was no cessation of the electrical colic, I faced ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... "surplus" betake themselves to huckstering. On Saturday afternoons, especially, when the whole working population is on the streets, the crowd who live from huckstering and peddling may be seen. Shoe and corset laces, braces, twine, cakes, oranges, every kind of small articles are offered by men, women, and children; and at other times also, such peddlers are always to be seen standing at the street corners, or going about with cakes and ginger-beer ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... thinks that Cinesias, who was tall and slight of build, wore a kind of corset of lime-wood to support his waist—surely rather a ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... where she is now staying. Can anything more disgraceful be imagined? They all console me by saying there is no one in Baton Rouge who could possibly wear my dresses without adding a considerable piece to the belt. But that is nonsense. Another pull at the corset strings would bring them easily to the size I have been reduced by nature and bones. Besides, O horror! Suppose, instead, they should let in a piece of another color? That would annihilate me! Pshaw! I do not care for the dresses, if they had only left ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... eyes, and ill-health had dulled their blue. That saddest of all changes she repaired by hand-massage, pomade, and belladonna. The somewhat unrefined exuberance of her figure she laced in an inimitable corset. Next she arrayed herself in a suit of dark blue cloth, simple and severely reticent; in a white silk blouse, simpler still, sewn with innocent daisies, Maggie's handiwork; in a hat, gay in form, austere in colour; and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... to him, she is doubly beautiful. Nature indeed had been generous with Coralie Standish-Roe. Nature has her moods and her devilish humours. She was more than amiable when she bestowed her gifts upon Coralie. You may talk about the value of a noble heart beating in an empty corset, shining out of pinched and tired eyes; but it is a value, unmarketable, where the good things in a woman's life are given in exchange. Janet Hallard and her like have learnt the realization of that. And of the qualities of noble-heartedness, Coralie possessed but very ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... January, 1836, a large collection of presents. There were in all no less than fifty-nine articles, among which were the following: a dress-box, a pair of boots, a thermometer, a carbine-carrier, a pair of trousers and a corset. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... green. Let the house dresses be simple, easy to launder, without constricting waist bands, of the one-piece type, in every way suitable for the work at hand. Under this outer dress, a princess petticoat should cover a specially designed maternity corset (if any corset at all be worn), to which is attached side hose-supporters. A support for the breasts may be worn if desired, it should be loose enough to ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... those of the ballad-makers. Place Charles Reade by the side of Douglas, and then what becomes of the "waist ye weel micht span"? After showing how the liver, lungs, heart, stomach and spleen are packed by Nature, the novelist asks: "Is it a small thing for the creature (who uses a corset) to say to her Creator, 'I can pack all this egg-china better than you can,' and thereupon to jam all those vital organs close by a powerful, a very powerful, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... In ten years, with hundreds of pupils each year, she is the greatest since Carrienta. But I must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists. Good afternoon. Good-by—Zoe"—placing his hands on her curls as if ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found that Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the last of the Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Telliere. It ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... lady who had sent them tickets for her tragedy, an elderly French gentleman who, on the strength of a week's stay at Folkestone, translated English fiction for the provincial press, a lady from Wichita, Kansas, who advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a clergyman's widow from Torquay who had written an "English Ladies' Guide to Foreign Galleries" and a Russian sculptor who lived on nuts and was "almost certainly" an anarchist. It was this nucleus, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend continued somewhat inexorably silent, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... a large party, both Portuguese and English, at the consul's. In the well-dressed women I saw to-night, I had great difficulty in recognising the slatterns of the other morning. The senhoras were all dressed after the French fashion: corset, fichu, garniture, all was proper, and even elegant, and there was a great display of jewels. Our English ladies, though quite of the second rate of even colonial gentility, however, bore away the prize of beauty ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... tied round her head, how much was her beauty improved, when decorated with the graceful ornaments worn by the ladies of this country! She was dressed in white muslin, lined with rose-coloured taffeta. Her small and elegant shape was displayed to advantage by her corset, and the lavish profusion of her light tresses were carelessly blended with her simple head-dress. Her fine blue eyes were filled with an expression of melancholy: and the struggles of passion, with which her heart was agitated, flushed her cheek, and ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... inevitable in a scientific age, and the result has been on the whole an advance of knowledge, and improved treatment of specific ailments. The danger is apparent. It is that of the moral specialist, who has only one hobby and traces every human ill to strong liquor or tobacco, or the corset, or taxation of personal property, or denial of universal suffrage, or the eating of meat, or the want of the centralization of nearly all initiative and interest and property in the state. The tendency of the accomplished specialist in medicine is to refer all physical trouble ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... admitted to the ranks of the agitators. The initial revolt was thoroughgoing. They discarded the corset, discarded it when it was still improper to speak the word! They cut off their hair, cut it off in a day when every woman owned a chignon. They discarded the corset, cut off their ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... had been sitting writing only half dressed, folded the paper reverently, put it to her lips for lack of a seal, and then buttoned it firmly inside her corset waist. ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... periot made of gray Indian taffetas with dark stripes of the same color with two collars, one white, one yellow with blue silk fringe, having a reverse trimmed in the same manner. Under the periot was a yellow corset of cross blue stripes. Around the bosom of the periot was a frill of white vandyked gauze of the same form covered with black gauze which hangs in streamers down her back. Her hair behind is a large braid with a monstrous ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... the speaker, was no ordinary woman of Western make. She had been imported from the East by her husband three years before. She had been 'forelady in a corset factory,' when matrimony had enticed her away, and the thought that walked beside her as she baked, and washed, and fed the calves, was that some day she would go 'back East.' And this in spite of the fact that for those ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... "Corset, perhaps," he suggested. "And the apology? A verbal one will suffice on this occasion, accompanied by the sum of one shilling for the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... of corsets meets the strong disapproval of all Delsarteans, as "control of the breath underlies gesture, walk and voice," and a tightened corset-lace necessarily cramps the breathing power. The tight, high collar is also objectionable for ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... But, if it's goin' t' comfort you any, there's that corset cover you made me last Christmas. I ain't never wore it; I ain't dared to with all them trimmin's an' lace insertion, an' me s' bony here an' there. You can have it an' willin', my dear, an' then ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... admired, the Very Best That ever a French hand-boned Corset prest, Wore what they used to call Prunella Boots, And put on Nightcaps ere they went ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... into the house. She was determined that her cousin should be as well dressed as Madame Garceland's little girl. She bought the child fashionable boots of bronzed kid like those the little Tiphaines wore, very fine cotton stockings, a corset by the best maker, a dress of blue reps, a pretty cape lined with white silk,—all this that she, Sylvie, might hold her own against the children of the women who had rejected her. The underclothes were quite in keeping with the visible articles of dress, for Sylvie ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... be made later. In these exceptional mills everything is neat and perfectly clean, all the stock used being new and fresh from the cotton or linen mills, or from factories producing cloth goods, like shirt and corset factories, and others of the same sort. The sorting and shredding room is always large and light, with windows on all sides, and well ventilated, offering a decided contrast in many respects to the less cleanly mills ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... the Duke who, after a life of hard warfare and stern piety, had resigned his office to his son and died in the "angelica vestis" of the tertiary order; and the "beatified" Duchess who had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670, and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset that seemed stiff enough to serve all the purposes of bodily mortification. So the file descended, the colours fading, the shadows deepening, till it reached a baby porporato of the last century, who had donned the cardinal's habit at four, and stood rigid and a little pale in his red robes and ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... whole State, and the commissioner therefore limited his inquiry to a thorough investigation of the working-women of San Francisco, in number about twenty thousand. The State has but one cotton-mill, but there are silk, jute, woollen, corset, and shirt factories, with many minor industries. Home and general sanitary conditions were all investigated, the bureau following the general lines ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... around me. Says Corder, struggling with his pack, "Bann, will you help me into my corset." Pickle says to Reardon (out of David's hearing) "Ten cents for a bum piece of pie that you have to eat with your hands! That gets my goat." And just now has come a hoot from every part of the camp when from I company, in line to start and loading guns for a skirmish, ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... a caged wild thing. Giacinta had to be as a mother with her. The poor trembling girl, who had begun to perceive that the carriage was bearing them to some unknown destination, tore open the bands of her corset and drew her mistress's head against the full warmth of her bosom, rocked her, and moaned over her, mixing comfort and lamentation in one offering, and so contrived to draw the tears out from her, a storm of tears; not fitfully hysterical, but tears that poured a black veil over the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... like a spaniel's, not of fat, but heaviness. Hattie's arms and thighs were granite to the touch and to the scales. Kindly freckled granite. She weighed almost twice what she looked. Marcia, whose hips were like lyres, hated the ridge above the corset line and massaged ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... waists from ignorant dress-makers. If young ladies could hear the remarks made on these small waists by men generally, and especially men of taste, they would never again show themselves till they had loosened their corset-laces and ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... said, reaching down into her collar and drawing up a loop of worn ribbon. "Straight front corset," she observed, flushing, "makes a nice pocket for almost everything." She drew up a chamois-skin bag, of an unprepossessing mouse colour, and emptied out a roll of bills. "Two hundred and twelve dollars," ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... young men of her class; too much exercise, or lack of rest and quiet at certain periods when nature demands it. All the while the physician is silent concerning the glove-fitting, steel-clasped corset, the heavy, dragging skirts, the bands engirding the body, the pinching, deforming boot, and the ruinous social dissipation of fashionable society. These will account for much of the feebleness of young women and girls. For they exhaust nervous force, make freedom ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... and satins, and big words, and dogs, and parasols, and so many, many that are a chasin' of her and a follerin' of her up, it seemed more as if she loved to get away from it all, and get where she could take her crown off, lay down her septer, onhook her corset, and put on a long loose gown, and lounge round ...
— Samantha at Saratoga • Marietta Holley
... the least prudish by the abandon of her dancing and the tenuity of her costume, which, we are told, consisted of "a single embroidered garment, fastened beneath the bosom, without the shadow of a corset and without sleeves." And at Naples, where King Joachim Murat gave her a regal reception, with a sequel of fetes and gala-performances in honour of the wife of the Regent of England, she attended a rout, at the Teatro San Carlo, so lightly attired "that many who saw her at her first ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... funnel of wool and cotton that obliterated every sign of sex and made it impossible to image the existence of a fleshy reality beneath the bulk of cloth. Rows of filigree buttons glittered on the cuffs of her jacket; on her breast, crushed flat by a monastic corset which seemed made of iron, shone a triple chain of gold with its enormous links; from beneath the kerchief worn on the head hung her heavy braids tied with ribbons. On the bench, serving as a cushion for her voluminous body, made bulky by skirts, lay the abrigais, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... had given her a high opinion of its merits. Now she paused at each individual bit of finery, where before she had hurried on. Her woman's heart was warm with desire for them. How would she look in this, how charming that would make her! She came upon the corset counter and paused in rich reverie as she noted the dainty concoctions of colour and lace there displayed. If she would only make up her mind, she could have one of those now. She lingered in the jewelry department. She saw the earrings, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... served. Then she went back to the kitchen, and the thud of her iron was heard as she deftly fluted the ruffles of the crepe blouse. Floss appeared when the meal was half eaten, her hair shiningly coiffed, the pink ribbons of her corset cover showing under her thin kimono. She poured herself a cup of tea and drank it in little quick, nervous gulps. She looked deliriously young, and fragile and appealing, her delicate slenderness revealed by the flimsy garment she wore. Excitement and anticipation lent a glow to ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... all sorts of ladies' and children's undergarments, such as skirts, underskirts, infants' short dresses, chemises, night robes, drawers, corset covers, etc. ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... driver stood in the full light a German officer, a tall young man, fair and slender, tightly encased in his uniform like a woman in her corset, his flat shiny cap, tilted to one side of his head, making him look like an English hotel runner. His exaggerated mustache, long and straight and tapering to a point at either end in a single blond hair that could hardly be seen, seemed to weigh ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... naked agony a shapeless mass of frill and flounce, a horrible and not dramatic spectacle of abandonment; decencies gone down before desire, the heart ruptured and broken through its walls. In such a moment of soul dishabille and her own dishabille of bosom bulging above the tight lacing of her corset-line as she lay prone, her mouth sagging and wet with tears, her lips blowing outward in bubbles, a picture, in fact, to gloss over, Mae Munroe dragged herself closer, flinging her arms about the knees of Mr. Zincas, sobbing through her ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... the merry hearted Flora, who quickly doffed the blue jerkin that, girded round her waist, had given her such a sailor-like air, and disclosed a bust of such perfect symmetry, that it would have served as a model for a statue of Diana. And this was charmingly displayed in a sleeved corset of dark green color, cut after the fashion of a habit, with an incision in front, disclosing a stomacher of fine Spanish lace, set with rows of tiny brilliants. Her gauntlets quickly followed her jerkin, exposing tiny, swan white fingers, sparkling with jewels. And although herself unconscious of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the second point, comfort, I do not believe that the wearer of a fashionable costume is either comfortable or contented. I will say nothing of the unnecessary garments which the average woman affects, but let us see what can be said for the tight corset binding the waist. So far from being comfortable it must be most inconvenient, a sort of perpetual penance and it is certainly injurious to the health. I feel confident that physicians will support me in my belief that the death-rate among American women would be less if corset and other ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... pair. I wish you could have seen 'em. Not that you wouldn't have been a match for 'em," she added consolingly. "You and Mr. George look mighty well when you're together. You're just on a level, and if you could manage to tighten yo' corset a little mite at the waist, and hold yo'self with that bend out at the back the way Florrie does, you'd have pretty near as fine a figure as she has. Ain't it funny," she added irrelevantly, "but I was just studyin' last night about ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... assembled. The simpler yet more manly fashions he had taken from the provinces were now exchanged for an attire worthy the kinsman of the great minister of a court unparalleled, since the reign of William the Red King, for extravagant gorgeousness of dress. His corset was of the finest cloth, sown with seed pearls; above it the lawn shirt, worn without collar, partially appeared, fringed with gold; over this was loosely hung a super-tunic of crimson sarcenet, slashed and pounced with a profusion of fringes. His velvet ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... merely for her sex but for her sanity: her letter is extremely sensible. She makes two points: that high heels are a necessity for any lady who wishes to keep her dress clean from the Stygian mud of our streets, and that without a tight corset 'the ordinary number of petticoats and etceteras' cannot be properly or conveniently held up. Now, it is quite true that as long as the lower garments are suspended from the hips a corset is an absolute necessity; the mistake lies in not suspending all apparel from the shoulders. In the latter ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... eighteen years of age, and has been sent to Brussels to finish her education; she is of middle size, stiffly made, body long, legs short, bust much developed but not compactly moulded, waist disproportionately compressed by an inhumanly braced corset, dress carefully arranged, large feet tortured into small bottines, head small, hair smoothed, braided, oiled, and gummed to perfection; very low forehead, very diminutive and vindictive grey eyes, somewhat ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... needs be doubled. For his death the blood Of famed Hippolochus' son was horror-chilled; For this was his dear friend. With one swift thrust He pierced the sevenfold hides of Aias' shield, Yet touched his flesh not; stayed the spear-head was By those thick hides and by the corset-plate Which lapped his battle-tireless limbs. But still From that stern conflict Glaucus drew not back, Burning to vanquish Aias, Aeacus' son, And in his folly vaunting threatened him: "Aias, men name thee mightiest man of all The ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... grass. The chocolate factory still diffuses its pleasant candied whiff. At noontime the street is full of the high-spirited pupils of the Washington Irving High School. As for the Irving house itself, it is getting a new coat of paint. The big corset works, we dare say, has come since O. Henry's time. We had quite an adventure there once. We can't remember how it came about, but for some reason or other we went to that building to see the chief engineer. All we can remember about it was that he had ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... graceful draping, his easy attitudes, his power of representing the passions. As to skilful grouping or dramatic effect in painting, all that was quite out of the question. He had nothing before his eyes but the eternal uniform, corset, or dress-coat—objects chilling to the artist, and affording little scope to imagination. By and by even the most ordinary merits disappeared, one by one, from his productions; and they still enjoyed the highest reputation, though real judges and artists ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... Her mouth, the vermilion of her lips, and her ivory teeth were all perfect. Her well-shaped forehead gave her an air approaching the majestic. Kindness and gaiety sparkled in her eyes; while her plump white hands, her rounded finger-tips, her pink nails, her breast, which the corset seemed scarcely able to restrain, her dainty feet, and her prominent hips, made her worthy of the chisel of Praxiteles. She was just on her eighteenth year, and so far had escaped the connoisseurs. By a lucky chance I came across ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... exception of a kind having a cross-arm like the halberd commonly used in China from the seventh century before Christ. Yamato armour affords little assistance to the archaeologist: it bears no particularly close resemblance to any type familiar elsewhere. There was a corset made of sheet iron, well rivetted. It fastened in front and was much higher behind than before, additioned protection for the back being provided by a lattice-guard which depended from the helmet and was made by fastening strips of sheet iron to leather or cloth. The helmet ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... in her right hand. The characteristic feature of both figures is the modernness of their lines, which are as different as possible from those of the statues of classic Greece. The waist is exceedingly slender, and altogether 'the lines adopted are those considered ideal by the modern corset-maker rather than ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... midnight arrived, the impatient bridegroom springing into his saddle gallops to the house of his friend, and conducted into the presence of his bride instantly rips open her corset with his poniard. This is the conclusion of the ceremony by which is rather cut than tied the Circassian knot of matrimony, there being neither priest nor magistrate employed to fasten ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... kind of cigarette, and a novelist than any man living. I went by train to see a friend in the country, and after passing through a patent mucilage, some more hams, a South African Investment Company, a Parisian millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and original kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost continuously ran ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... supported. In some instances there was no strap over the shoulders, the upper third of these alabaster torsos and arms being absolutely naked, save for a band of pearls, diamonds, or other gems, of a size rarely seen in the Orient; but I learned later that the bone or steel corset, which molds the form, constituted the support of the gown. I gradually became habituated to the custom, and did not notice it. My friend ——, an artist of repute, explained that it all depends on the point of view. ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... of late wouldn't come amiss. There's that lavender satin waist, too, you bought at Jerome's the other day. I know I should look perfectly killing in it; and—oh! ye Hiltonites!—she has just bought six of the sweetest corset covers you ever laid eyes on; think of it!—six! She could spare three just as well as not, and I'm sure she has at least a dozen pairs of silk stockings, while"- -with a doleful sigh—"I don't own a blessed one. Then there are ribbons and laces, fans ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... ear-splitting music. Next to him came a personage bearing the insignia—I suppose we must term it—of the brigade. This affair reminded me of nothing at home so much as the stall or stand of the itinerant vendor of boot and corset laces in our streets, the laces in this case being represented by strips of gilded leather, and surmounted by a ball, on which was traced a great character in gold, signifying fire, in the language of the children of the "rising sun." Then followed their box-like ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... girls wish to be happy, merry workers, as well as hard, responsible workers, they will have to learn to do without stays; they will have to train their own muscles to supply them with the support they now seek in the corset. ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various
... of a girl's clothing is one of the most important matters in her whole regimen. Clothing may neutralize the beneficial effects of her otherwise hygienic habits. The long-continued even though light pressure of the corset—and it is seldom light—interferes with the free circulation of the blood. The alteration in intro-abdominal pressure is conducive to misplacements of abdominal and pelvic organs; the anterior pressure on the iliac bones, the ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various
... she can sleep; yet dressed enough for any emergency. I think a house gown of pretty material much neater than the kimono. Be sure this fits about the shoulders, and never have loose flowing sleeves. A white frill in the neck looks very trim, and is always becoming. The corset and all tight clothes should be removed, stockings and underwear kept on. The hair should be arranged simply, but not allowed to hang in a loose braid, unless you are very sure you will not see any but the patient, and even then it may be unwise, as a braid of hair ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... girls of the hotel, she arrayed herself in the garments of a Japanese lady of position with her hair dressed in the shiny black helmet-shape, and her waist encased in the broad, tight obi or sash, which after all was no more uncomfortable than a corset. Thus attired she came down to dinner one evening, trotting behind her husband as a well-trained Japanese wife should do. In foreign dress she appeared petite and exotic, but one would have hesitated to name the land of her birth. It was a shock to Geoffrey to see her again in her ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... to go home. She didn't want me to leave. I wouldn't tell her why. She said, 'I speck you going to get married.' She gave me a nice white silk dress. Mrs. Drennand made it. My owner, Miss Leila Nash, lend me one of her chemisette, a corset cover, and a dress had ruffles around the bottom. It was wide. She never married. I borrowed my veil from a colored woman that had used it. Mr. Rollwage (dead now but was a lawyer at Forrest City) gave Scott a tie and white vest and lend him his watch and chain to be married ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... fanged snout-bones of a dog. There was a constant rustling of rats that played among the rib cages, sat atop crania, scuttled behind shin-bones. Brett picked his way, stepping over imitation pearl necklaces, zircon rings, plastic buttons, hearing aids, lipsticks, compacts, corset stays, prosthetic devices, rubber heels, wrist watches, lapel watches, pocket watches with corroded ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... day. Jimmy and Billy were playing in Sarah Jane's cabin, she, however, being in happy ignorance of the fact. Her large stays, worn to the preaching the night before, were hanging on the back of a chair. "Ain't I glad I don' have to wear no corset when I puts on long pants?" remarked Billy, pointing to the article. "Ain't that a big one? It's twice's big's ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... a man utters these words to a woman, no matter whom, that woman,—who knows that stays will bend,—seizes her corset by the lower end, and bends it out, saying, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... that come from wearing tightly laced corsets is the compression of the ribs. The unyielding steel and buckram will not permit a variation in the waist measure as a deep breath is inhaled or expelled. The proper and healthful corset is the one that expands or contracts with each respiration of its wearer, and that is why I am such an enthusiastic devotee of the corset waist with the elastic bands on either side. It matters not one bit how tight the ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... is anything comparable to the joy of taking in your clothes, I have not experienced it. And when you find your corset coming closer and closer together (I advise a front lace, so this can be watched), and then the day you realize that you will have to stitch in a tuck or ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... silks. Their garments partake of the loose flowing order. For instance, a strong fabric of chosen shade is fastened at the neck, hip, knee and ankle, and lies carelessly over the parts between. The females never graduated to the corset degree, and while they do not cut a scientific figure, yet they surely develop a more ruddy waist after the model intended by the ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... is! I should like one of these days to be that kind of beauty, so tall and slender. Her waist measure is only twenty-one and two thirds inches. The woman who makes her corsets and my mamma's told us so. She brought us one of her corsets to look at, a love of a corset, in brocatelle, all over many-colored flowers. That material is much more 'distingue' than the ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... only goes beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... celebrities well enough to slap them on the backs and call them by pet names and lend them money. That of course should be a great assistance in knowing just how to approach the president of a big city bank and touch him for a cigar in a red-and-gold corset, while he is telling you to make yourself at home around the place until a job turns up. Allie Bangs, my chum, went on East with me. We had decided to rise side by side and to buy the same make of yachts. Of course we were sensible. We didn't expect to crowd out any magnates the ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... daughter of the preceding. About 1820 was a corset-fitter at No. 14 rue de la Corderie-du-Temple, Paris; employed by Mme. Meynardie. She was also the mistress of Gatien Bourignard. Passionately jealous, she rashly made a scene in the home of Jules Desmarets, her lover's son-in-law. Then she drowned herself, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... managed to find Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind, And be safe in my corset-lacing. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... 'finish off' the neck of Mrs. Fox-Moore's gowns, as allow the funereal dulness of them to overflow on to her brown neck. It even cast an added shadow on her sallow cheek. The figure of the older woman, gaunt and thin enough, announced the further constriction of the corset. By way of revenge the sharp shoulder-blades poked the corset out till it defined a ridge in the black silk back. In front, too, the slab-like figure declined co-operation with the corset, and withdrew, leaving a ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... francs which her father-in-law, touched by her goodness, sent to her once a month. Nevertheless, foreseeing that that resource might fail her, the poor young woman had taken up the hard and toilsome work of corset-making in the service of a celebrated dressmaker. This precaution proved a wise one. The father died, and his property was obtained by the son (the old monarchical laws of entail being then overthrown) and speedily dissipated by him. The former Master of petitions was ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... common enough deformity at that time, although now, it is said, affected by third rate actresses and women of indifferent character only. The waist is an infallible index to the moral worth of a woman; very little of the latter survives the pressure of a tightened corset. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... very small children; but his observations have not been confirmed by others. Thus, Sibson states that the characteristic costal type of respiration begins in girls at the age of ten, for which reason some observers have assumed that the wearing of the corset is the cause of its appearance; others, however, among whom Hutchinson may be mentioned, deny this alleged causal connexion, stating that they have observed costal respiration in young girls who have never worn any constricting ...
— The Sexual Life of the Child • Albert Moll
... whom she had caused to be sent for, found, on entering the room, to her great astonishment, Cardinal Fesch discharging the duty of a lady's maid by lacing up his sister, who had on only her underclothing and her corset. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... should be warm and at the same time sufficiently loose to prevent the constriction of any part of the body. And whatever the adult woman may elect to do in the matter of wearing corsets herself, she does her young daughter an irreparable injury by constricting and moulding her growing body in these corset-splints. Corsets placed on the young girl interfere with the functions of circulation, respiration, digestion, and of the pelvic organs, also with muscular development. In addition to all this, the girl is handicapped ...
— The Four Epochs of Woman's Life • Anna M. Galbraith
... mouth-veil, the crippled foot, the harem, the barred lattice, the corset, the eunuch, the denial of education to women, the very text of the marriage-rites in all countries, are man's ideas of keeping woman for himself, from herself. The Orient is rotted with ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... complexion, notwithstanding her continual rambles along the beach in her girlish days, of exquisite purity. Her education, I grieve to say, had been most shamefully neglected; her mother, though a most exemplary woman, both as a Christian and a member of society, had never tied her up in a fashionable corset to improve her figure, nor sent her to a fashionable boarding school to improve her mind; the consequence was that she knew nothing of the piano,—Virgil seems to have had the gift of prophecy with regard to this part of modern ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... it is—no, here— "Kiss them. Eustacia hung her head; Whereat he said, 'Eustacia dear'— And sweetly low Eustacia said:" (Continued on page 17.) Here, just between the corset ad. And that of Smithers' Canderine. (Eustacia sweet, ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... call at three. Walked to the Exchange and read the English papers, after dinner went and sat three hours with Mr. Scholfield; found him less altered than most of my old acquaintances, he lives with his daughter who is married to a Londoner, named Patten, and carries on the stay or corset business. Mr. S. a very sensible man greatly opposed to Jackson; has some little municipal office; well acquainted with the Crooks, Mrs. Marsden, and others. Had tea with the Masons, and had a good deal of talk about old matters in England. ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood
... progressing, but not so rapidly as he wished. To aid matters a bit, he invented a brace and extension to his middle finger. It gave him a farther reach and a stronger stroke, he thought. In secret he practised for hours with this "corset" on his finger; he didn't know that a corset means weakness, not strength. After three straight hours of practise one day, he took the machine from his hand and was astonished to see the finger curl up like a pretzel. He hurried to a physician ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... gentleman-in-waiting, cleanly shaven and speaking her language, and not in the one I acquired lately, she would have buttoned her shoes, gartered her stockings, and would not have shown the bad quality of her corset cover under her wide-opened robe-de-chambre. If she only knew how ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... shoulders, on which they were loosely hung. Her costume was remarkable for the partial development, on all possible occasions, of some flannel vestment of a singular structure; also for affording glimpses, in the region of the back, of a corset, or a pair of stays, in colour a dead green. Being always in a state of gaping admiration at everything, and absorbed, besides, in the perpetual contemplation of her mistress's perfections and the baby's, Miss Slowboy, in her little errors ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... the water we caught sturgeon, and a very extraordinary kind of fish. It resembles the trout, with this difference, that its mouth is larger. Near its nose—which is smaller, as are also the eyes—is a large bone, shaped like a woman's corset-bone, three fingers wide and a cubit long, at the end of which is a disk as wide as one's hand. This frequently causes it to fall backward when it leaps out of the water." This was the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... have a fair chance. And she dressed herself as if for a ball; she brought intentionally into evidence two hillocks of such snowy whiteness that the whitest linen neckerchief would have paled before them; indeed, these fruits of love stood out, without a wrinkle, over her corset, like two beautiful apples, and made one's mouth water, so exquisite were they. This noble lady, who was one of those who rouse one's manhood, had a smile ready on her lips for the old fellow. Vieux par-Chemins, dressed in garments of coarse ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... little girlie!" said the newcomer, panting from the climb upstairs, and turning a cold, fresh-colored cheek for Susan's kiss. She took off a long coat, displaying beneath, a black walking- skirt, an elaborate high collar, and a view of shabby corset and shabby corset-cover between. "Ma wanted butter," she explained, with a pleasant, rueful smile, "and I just slipped into anything to ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... 1.—Remove impediments to respiration. Remove collar, loosen all waist bands and cords, unhook corset or cut the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... rustling of rats that played among the rib cages, sat atop crania, scuttled behind shin-bones. Brett picked his way, stepping over imitation pearl necklaces, zircon rings, plastic buttons, hearing aids, lipsticks, compacts, corset stays, prosthetic devices, rubber heels, wrist watches, lapel watches, pocket watches with ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... and cotton that obliterated every sign of sex and made it impossible to image the existence of a fleshy reality beneath the bulk of cloth. Rows of filigree buttons glittered on the cuffs of her jacket; on her breast, crushed flat by a monastic corset which seemed made of iron, shone a triple chain of gold with its enormous links; from beneath the kerchief worn on the head hung her heavy braids tied with ribbons. On the bench, serving as a cushion for her voluminous body, made bulky by skirts, lay the abrigais, the feminine ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... were hung fresh fish, and when dried they are stowed away with the wappatoo roots under the beds. The dress of the men was like that of the people above; but the women were clad in a peculiar manner, the robe not reaching lower than the hip, and the body being covered in cold weather by a sort of corset of fur, curiously plaited, and reaching from the arms to the hip: added to this was a sort of petticoat, or, rather, tissue of white cedar bark, bruised or broken into small strands and woven into a girdle by several cords of the same material. Being ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... copies of Parisian cockneydom, into thy Highland home; nor give up the healthful and graceful, free and modest dress of thy mother and thy mother's mother, to disfigure the little kirk on Sabbath days with crinoline and corset, high-heeled boots, and other ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... labels. Most of 'em had turned out to be persimmons and dogwoods, with a grove or two of blackjacks and poplars. The only one that showed any signs of bearing anything was a fine young cottonwood that had put forth a hornet's nest and half of an old corset-cover. ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... here it is—no, here— "Kiss them. Eustacia hung her head; Whereat he said, 'Eustacia dear'— And sweetly low Eustacia said:" (Continued on page 17.) Here, just between the corset ad. And that of Smithers' Canderine. (Eustacia ...
— Tobogganing On Parnassus • Franklin P. Adams
... Corset Ankle Supports With Removable Bones The only real support for weak or sprained ankles Men's, Ladies' and Misses'. Price, per pair $1.00 Children's. Price per pair .50 Made in Tan or Black Leather. When ordering state size ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... trying to find a rhyme for alfalfa, maybe. And where would you be, you old skate? If the Louise of me had been developed at the expense of the Billy of me, and I'd taken to making battenburg doilies with butterflies in the corners, and embroidering corset covers till I put my eyes out, and writing poetry on Sundays when mommie wouldn't let me sew. I wonder if Ward— Maybe he'd have liked me better if I'd lived up to the Louise and cut out the Billy part. I'd be ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... more sublimated than the exquisite of the nineteenth century. The dandy is of modern date; but there is some polish on him—suppose it be on his boots alone. Shape and make are attended to by him; witness the Cumberland corset, and his making what he can of every body. Then, again, he must have a smattering of French, and affect to be above old England. When he smokes, he does it from vanity, to show his ecume de mer pipe. He may have a gold snuff-box ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... and after a while it feels loose, and you say it certainly is loose. I will give a simple rule by which you may know whether your clothing is loose enough or not. Unfasten every article of clothing; dress, corset, skirt-bands, everything. Now breathe in slowly until every air-cell is full. It may take some practice to do this, but persevere until you find the chest elevated and filled to its utmost extent. It should swell out at the sides along the line of the insertion of the diaphragm. ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... MENSTRUATION.—It is also an opportune time to demonstrate to what extent serious results may follow mistakes in dressing. The habit of permitting growing girls to constrict the waist, to bind and pull the abdomen by too tight garters, or too tight corset, is wrong, and no mother should permit it. In another part of the book, this matter is taken up more fully, but if it is explained to the girl while she is considering the subject of menstruation, she may more quickly and more fully appreciate ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... their shadows on the transparent whiteness of her cheeks. Over her neck and breast of ivory flowed the golden waves of her magnificent hair, which had come down at the time of her fall. When, as they unlaced her satin corset, less soft, less fresh, less white than the virgin form beneath, which lay like a statue of alabaster in its covering of lace and lawn, one of the horrible hags felt the arms and shoulders of the young girl with her large, red, horny, and chapped hands. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... tragedy. They were neither comic nor tragic, but modest and charming. There was also a small shop-keeper, covered with jewels. She sat very rigid, far forward on the bench, compressed into a terrible corset which forced her breast and back into the humps of a punchinello; her legs hanging just short of the floor. Her daughter paced up and down the long room like a colt snorting impatiently to be put through its paces. She had the beauty of a classic type, without spot or blemish, but her joints ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... I heard him explode. "Confound it! This is no place for petticoats, Baron! And as for that Yankee ornithologist, he's hung himself with the Countess's corset—string—yes, he has! Don't tell me, Baron! The young idiot was all right until the Countess looked at him, I tell you. Gad! how she crumpled him up with those blue eyes of hers! What the devil do women come into such committees for? Eh? It's an outrage, I tell ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... think, Yet they play for shoes, for drabs and drink. She, my lawless, sharp-tongued gypsy maid Will not scorn with me this jail-bird trade, Pets some fox-eyed boy who turns the trick, Tho' he win a button or a stick, Pencil, garter, ribbon, corset-lace— HIS the glory, MINE is ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... to the joy of taking in your clothes, I have not experienced it. And when you find your corset coming closer and closer together (I advise a front lace, so this can be watched), and then the day you realize that you will have to stitch in a tuck or get ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... stolid, almost stupid; he could not but note again her full young figure, her well-shaped, well-poised head, and her regular features, and the pity of it seemed all the greater by reason thereof. He tried to visualize her perfectly groomed, clad in a smart gown molded over a well-fitting corset, with her feet properly shod and her hair dressed—but the task was beyond him. Probably she had never worn a corset, never seen a pair of silk stockings. He thought, too, of what was in store for her and wondered how she would fit into the new world she was about ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... been broken near the center by a high apartment building, and another still higher rose like a cliff just back of the house in which Roger lived. Still others, and many factory lofts, reared shadowy bulks on every hand. From the top of one an enormous sign, a corset pictured forth in lights, flashed out at regular intervals; and from farther off, high up in the misty haze of the night, could be seen the gleaming pinnacle where hour by hour that great bell slowly boomed the time away. Yes, ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... women by punishments alone. They are eternally tempted to folly, yet snubbed the moment they would be wise. A million shops spread their nets, and entice them by their direst foible. Their very mothers—for want of medical knowledge in the sex—clasp the fatal, idiotic corset on their growing bodies, though thin as a lath. So the girl grows up, crippled in the ribs and lungs by her own mother; and her life, too, is in stays—cabined, cribbed, confined: unless she can paint, or act, or write novels, every ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... playing in Sarah Jane's cabin, she, however, being in happy ignorance of the fact. Her large stays, worn to the preaching the night before, were hanging on the back of a chair. "Ain't I glad I don' have to wear no corset when I puts on long pants?" remarked Billy, pointing to the article. "Ain't that a big one? It's twice's big's ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... Always corsetless, she was not straight-laced. Given the attraction and with it the incentive, and that tam-o'-shanter might have gone flying over the windmill. The tam was very safe. There was no incentive and, though there was no moral corset either, she was temperamentally unable to go poaching on another's preserves. Barring the chimerical, that any girl may consider and most girls do, she was straight as a string. A shabby old man had no need ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... white linen petticoat wid tuckers at de hem, just a little long, to show good and white 'long wid de blue of de skirt and de red of de underskirt. Dese all come up to my waist and was held together by de string dat held my bustle in place. All dis and my corset was hid by de snow white pleated pique bodice, dat drapped gracefully from my shoulders. 'Round my neck was a string of green jade beads. I wore red stockin's and my foots was stuck in soft, black, cloth, ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... comely person already assembled. The simpler yet more manly fashions he had taken from the provinces were now exchanged for an attire worthy the kinsman of the great minister of a court unparalleled, since the reign of William the Red King, for extravagant gorgeousness of dress. His corset was of the finest cloth, sown with seed pearls; above it the lawn shirt, worn without collar, partially appeared, fringed with gold; over this was loosely hung a super-tunic of crimson sarcenet, slashed and pounced with a profusion of ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... platter. She saw that Al and her father were served. Then she went back to the kitchen, and the thud of her iron was heard as she deftly fluted the ruffles of the crepe blouse. Floss appeared when the meal was half eaten, her hair shiningly coiffed, the pink ribbons of her corset cover showing under her thin kimono. She poured herself a cup of tea and drank it in little quick, nervous gulps. She looked deliriously young, and fragile and appealing, her delicate slenderness revealed by the flimsy garment ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... in a corset which she wore only once a week, walked along erect, with her squeezed-in waist, her broad shoulders and prominent hips, swinging herself a little. She wore a hat trimmed with flowers, made by a milliner at Yvetot, and displayed the back of her full, round, supple neck, reddened by ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's and Giorgione's pictures, she is distressed above measure, and begins to make secret inquiries into reducing diet, and to cling desperately to the strongest corset-lacing as her only hope. It would require one to be better educated than most of our girls are, to be willing to look like the Sistine Madonna or the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... Hoskins was not prepared for. She had put on a gown of her own making,—the secret toil of many a long night,—amateurishly fashioned from some cheap yellow calico the doctor had sent her, yet fitting her wonderfully, and showing every curve of her graceful figure. Unaccented by a corset,—an article she had never known,—even the lines of the stiff, unyielding calico had a fashion that was nymph-like and suited her unfettered limbs. Doctor Ruysdael was profoundly moved. Though a philosopher, he was practical. He found himself ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... suspected by the police, who took him for a girl dressed in boy's clothes, and threatened to arrest him. When he was compelled to put on male attire he consoled himself with wearing a woman's chemise and corset underneath. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... arrival in France his comrade called him only Mademoiselle Fifi. This nickname was bestowed upon him on account of his coquettish style of dressing and manners, his slender waist, which looked as if it were laced in a corset, his pale face on which a nascent mustache could hardly be seen, and also on account of the habit he had acquired, in order to express his supreme contempt for persons and things, of using continually the French locution: "Fi! fi donc!" which he pronounced ...
— Mademoiselle Fifi • Guy de Maupassant
... plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... accomplish almost anything within the power of human capacity, for girls have to study under all sorts of disadvantages that boys do not have to contend with. Hang a hoop-skirt on a boy's hips; lace him up in a corset; hang pounds of clothing and trailing skirts upon him; puff him out with humps and bunches behind; pinch his waist into a compass that will allow his lungs only half their breathing capacity; load his head down with superfluous ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... lot for a victim before it stops. She is also provided with a caudal appendage that ends in a patent fly-brush. This she uses to wrap around the neck of the milkmaid to prevent her getting away before she has a chance to kick her health corset off and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Marguerite de Valois herself, "the nuptials took place a few days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the people choking one another down below to see us pass." The marriage was celebrated on the 18th of August, by the Cardinal of Bourbon, in front ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... assisting Lesbia to spend the hundred pounds which her grandmother had sent her for the replenishment of her well-provided wardrobe. It is astonishing how little way a hundred pounds goes among the dressmakers, corset-makers, and shoemakers of Lutetia. ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... baleen? It so combines lightness, elasticity, and flexibility, that nothing yet invented adapts itself so perfectly to all the requirements of the fashionable corset. Whalebone whips are made from single pieces of baleen seven or eight feet long. A whalebone horsewhip costs from fifteen to eighteen dollars and will outlast a dozen cheaper persuaders. The Sairy Gamp umbrella of the last ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... the eyes of her family and friends with a genuine sensation of guilt. Perhaps three hours out of all her days were spent in some such occupation; between bathing, manicuring, hair-dressing, and intervals with her dressmaker and her corset woman it is improbable that the subject of her appearance was long out of the lady's mind. Yet she was not vain, nor was she particularly well satisfied with herself when it was done. That about one-fifth of ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... knees beside her, and loosened, as well as I was able, her dress and corset; but while I was thus engaged, a grasp descended ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... apparel not only goes beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true, ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... get away, for he feared his mother's plaint for money. He knew nothing of the three five-hundred-dollar bills now sewed up in the buxom Leah's corset. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... provenance, with the exception of a kind having a cross-arm like the halberd commonly used in China from the seventh century before Christ. Yamato armour affords little assistance to the archaeologist: it bears no particularly close resemblance to any type familiar elsewhere. There was a corset made of sheet iron, well rivetted. It fastened in front and was much higher behind than before, additioned protection for the back being provided by a lattice-guard which depended from the helmet and ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind, And be safe in my corset-lacing. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... You 'cannot agree'! You have seen her when she is laced in her stage costume, when she prinks and prattles, with the paint, and the powder, and her best corset on. It is I who am 'behind the scenes,' mon ami, not you. I see her dirty peignoir and her curl rags. At four o'clock in the afternoon. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... marry, I'll bet a hoss. If Redruth had married somebody else she might have done so, too. But he never turns up. She has these here things they call fond memories, and maybe a lock of hair and a corset steel that he broke, treasured up. Them sort of articles is as good as a husband to some women. I'd say she played out a lone hand. I don't blame no woman for old man Redruth's abandonment of barber shops ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... deformity to an instructed eye. Women must have received their notions of small waists from ignorant dress-makers. If young ladies could hear the remarks made on these small waists by men generally, and especially men of taste, they would never again show themselves till they had loosened their corset-laces and enlarged their belts." ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... didn't want me to leave. I wouldn't tell her why. She said, 'I speck you going to get married.' She gave me a nice white silk dress. Mrs. Drennand made it. My owner, Miss Leila Nash, lend me one of her chemisette, a corset cover, and a dress had ruffles around the bottom. It was wide. She never married. I borrowed my veil from a colored woman that had used it. Mr. Rollwage (dead now but was a lawyer at Forrest City) gave Scott a tie and white vest and lend him his watch ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... your eyes," says Nikolay Timofeitch in dismay. "What's that for? Come to the corset department, I'll screen you —it ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the beach in her girlish days, of exquisite purity. Her education, I grieve to say, had been most shamefully neglected; her mother, though a most exemplary woman, both as a Christian and a member of society, had never tied her up in a fashionable corset to improve her figure, nor sent her to a fashionable boarding school to improve her mind; the consequence was that she knew nothing of the piano,—Virgil seems to have had the gift of prophecy with regard to this part of modern education, when ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... a seam hemmed down to the goods to protect the raw edge. It is usually made in night dresses, drawers, corset covers, etc. Baste with the piece farthest from the worker extended one-eighth of an inch beyond the other and sewed with the grain of the goods, beginning at the widest part of any bias. Press the seam with the nail on the right ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... her pink-and-gray room with its soft lights. And Harriet herself conformed to the picture. She took a lesson from the New York modistes, and wore trailing black gowns. She strapped her thin figure into the best corset she could get, and had her black hair marcelled and dressed high. And, because she was a lady by birth and instinct, the result was not incongruous, but ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... doctor's office near by but did not find him; four other women employed in the house assisted mademoiselle to lift Germinie up and carry her to the bed in her mistress's room, on which they laid her after cutting her corset lacings. ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... to the English watering-places, quite unparalleled in the 'recollection of the oldest inhabitants.' There were blooming widows in every stage of grief and woe, from the becoming cap to the fashionable corset and ball flounce—widows who would never forget the dear deceased, or think of any other man—unless he had at least five thousand a year. Lovely girls, who didn't care a farthing if the man was 'only handsome'; and smiling ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... will, squire; gals, spread yeourselves areound and squat; take care o' yeour corset strings, and keep deth-ly still. Wall; neow, yeou all sot? Hain't none o' ye been in the pedlin' business, I guess; wall, no matter, tho' it's dread-ful pleasant sometimes: then ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... from her corset two notes of five hundred francs each, which were fastened by a pin to her chemise; then she sat down and offered them to her brother's defender. The rector gave the lawyer a flashing look which was ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... did everything as I desired, indeed, more, for she took off her petticoat and little corset, saying she would be cooler thus. So, following her example, I took off my trousers, saying she would be better able to see and play with my doodle. When these preliminaries were accomplished, I drew her on my knees—first pulling up her shift ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... modernness of their lines, which are as different as possible from those of the statues of classic Greece. The waist is exceedingly slender, and altogether 'the lines adopted are those considered ideal by the modern corset-maker rather ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... came along to avoid a rebuff, and having the satisfaction of knowing that she was ready before Brigitte. As for the latter, already furious at finding herself late, she had another cause for exasperation. The event of the day seemed to require a corset, a refinement which she usually discarded. The unfortunate maid, whose duty it was to lace her and to discover the exact point to which she was willing to be drawn in, alone knew the terrors and storms ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... herself in condition is making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency, and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in recreation, to ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... correct, for it fitted her neatly, save at the waist, which was even more than an inch too large, notwithstanding the fact that she had never worn such a corset as the well-formed Marie Bourgette ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... better, and when she has to confess that she has never done anything outside of her own house, and nothing there except agreeable things, such as entertaining friends who next week will entertain her, and embroidering 'insets' for corset-covers for dainty ladies who already have corset-covers enough to fill a store-window,—I wonder if she will be able to put it over on the heavenly doorkeeper that 'the Doctor would not let her.' If all I hear ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... that an attendant handed him Juve drew out the garments of the dead woman. The shoes were by a good maker, the silk stockings with open-work embroidery, the chemise and the drawers were of fine linen and the corset was well cut. ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... Wednesday night, By Jove you can do nothing right. I hear (perhaps the story false is,) From Almacks, that he never waltzes With Lady Anne or Lady Biddy, Twirling till he's in Love, or giddy. The girl a pigmy, he a giant, His cravat stiff, her corset pliant. There, while some jaded couple stops, The rest go round like humming tops. Each in the circle with its neighbour Sharing alternate rest and labour; While many a gentle chaperon As the fair Dervises spin on, Sighs with ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the skin, she looked at her handsome round arms and asked herself what her cousin did to make his hands so softly white, his nails so delicately curved. She put on new stockings and her prettiest shoes. She laced her corset straight, without skipping a single eyelet. And then, wishing for the first time in her life to appear to advantage, she felt the joy of having a new gown, well made, which ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... landing in front of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono, curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance, respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted to myself. The ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... mass of frill and flounce, a horrible and not dramatic spectacle of abandonment; decencies gone down before desire, the heart ruptured and broken through its walls. In such a moment of soul dishabille and her own dishabille of bosom bulging above the tight lacing of her corset-line as she lay prone, her mouth sagging and wet with tears, her lips blowing outward in bubbles, a picture, in fact, to gloss over, Mae Munroe dragged herself closer, flinging her arms about the knees of Mr. Zincas, sobbing through ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... stocks that you've been laying in of late wouldn't come amiss. There's that lavender satin waist, too, you bought at Jerome's the other day. I know I should look perfectly killing in it; and—oh! ye Hiltonites!—she has just bought six of the sweetest corset covers you ever laid eyes on; think of it!—six! She could spare three just as well as not, and I'm sure she has at least a dozen pairs of silk stockings, while"- -with a doleful sigh—"I don't own a blessed one. Then there are ribbons and laces, fans and handkerchiefs galore. Don't ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... worsted. It is cut very low in the neck, leaving a part of the breast bare, and descends to a point below the knee. A cotton cord tied around the waist keeps the chemise to the figure, and serves as girdle and corset at the same time. The space between the top of the chemise and the belt is used as a receptacle for cigars, money, and generally for all the small objects that elsewhere people carry in their pockets. The rebozo is worn over the head and shoulders, with the ends thrown back over the left ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... of Mrs. Fox-Moore's gowns, as allow the funereal dulness of them to overflow on to her brown neck. It even cast an added shadow on her sallow cheek. The figure of the older woman, gaunt and thin enough, announced the further constriction of the corset. By way of revenge the sharp shoulder-blades poked the corset out till it defined a ridge in the black silk back. In front, too, the slab-like figure declined co-operation with the corset, and withdrew, leaving a hiatus that the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... you have on, which compresses the center of the body, making you look a great deal fatter than you really are, must be taken off, and you must have a corset which any dress maker can fit to you—a corset for the lower part of the abdomen, which will raise this ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... rabbits of the laboratory and the professor's chair that had been preparing the ground for the present war with their sophistries and their unblushing effrontery! Their guilt was far greater than that of the Herr Lieutenant of the tight corset and the gleaming monocle, who in his thirst for strife and slaughter was simply and logically working out ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... mine," said Pete Murphy, "at night—all the corset and whisky signs flashing, the streets jammed with benzine-buggies, the sidewalks crowded with boobs, and every lobster palace filled to the roof with ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our friend continued somewhat ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... England journal: the Roumanian lady who had sent them tickets for her tragedy, an elderly French gentleman who, on the strength of a week's stay at Folkestone, translated English fiction for the provincial press, a lady from Wichita, Kansas, who advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a clergyman's widow from Torquay who had written an "English Ladies' Guide to Foreign Galleries" and a Russian sculptor who lived on nuts and was "almost certainly" an anarchist. It was this nucleus, and its outer ring of musical, architectural ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... living. I went by train to see a friend in the country, and after passing through a patent mucilage, some more hams, a South African Investment Company, a Parisian millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and original kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost continuously ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... this done systematically when my little French friend—I call her Mile. Henriette now—came to the door to say that she simply "could not stand another day of it." She had put, she said, all the ready money they had inside her corset, and a little box which contained all her dead father's decorations also, and she was ready to go. She took out the box and showed the pretty jeweled things,—his cross of the Legion d'Honneur, his Papal decoration, and several foreign orders,—her ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... taking place around me. Says Corder, struggling with his pack, "Bann, will you help me into my corset." Pickle says to Reardon (out of David's hearing) "Ten cents for a bum piece of pie that you have to eat with your hands! That gets my goat." And just now has come a hoot from every part of the camp when from I company, in line to start and loading ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... a "pendulous abdomen." Such a condition can be prevented by the use of several appliances, and the device best suited to the case should be chosen. Those who have never become accustomed to corsets will probably find a corset-waist or an abdominal supporter the most comfortable and useful. But the average young woman who has previously employed a sensible, well made, and loosely fitting corset need make no change until the third or fourth month of pregnancy. From ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... he continued, "to observe the powerful tonic effect of clothes. A woman patient told me once that the moral support, afforded by a well-fitting corset was inconceivable to the mind of a mere man. She said that a corset is to a woman what a hat is to a man— it prepares for any emergency, enables one to meet life on equal terms, and even to face a rebellious cook or janitor with 'that ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... continued; "be calm, and when the filipony (peddlers) come, buy yourself a pretty handkerchief." He then gave her a ruble and walked away. Anielka, after concealing the coin in her corset, ran quickly back to ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... CORSET.—At Sydenham, Ontario (it is stated), the Corset has been declared to be "incompatible with Christianity!" If some of our fashionable dames uttered their innermost feelings, they would doubtless reply, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. Sep. 12, 1891 • Various
... proceeding outwards, came the corset, a most serious affair. This exceedingly expensive instrument of torture was compounded chiefly of silk (which easily frayed) and whale-bone. Many good women of the middle class have gone to their graves for three hundred years believing that Almighty God had specially created toothless ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... and powder; the domestic animals at play, wild birds singing, and children brought up to colder water than their fathers. It should have been our business to pursue health till we no longer needed the interior of the chemist's shop, the optician's store, the hairdresser's, the corset-maker's, the thousand and one emporiums which patch and prink us, promoting our fancies and disguising the ravages which modern life makes in our figures. Our ambition should have been to need so little that, with our present scientific knowledge, we should have ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... explained to me by my friend, the ci-devant Comtesse, who at the same time assured me that young French women, clad in this airy manner, brave all the rigour of winter. "A simple piece of linen, slightly laced before," said she, "while it leaves the waist uncompressed, answers the purpose of a corset. If they put on a robe, which is not open in front, they dispense with petticoats altogether; their cambric chemise having the semblance of one, from its skirt being trimmed with lace. When attired for a ball, those who dance, as you may observe, commonly ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... dressing-gown and corset and set herself to the task of pinching and mauling her throat, arms and shoulders, to remove superfluous flesh, and strengthen muscles and fibres to resist the flabby tendencies which time produces. Then she used the ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... advance of knowledge, and improved treatment of specific ailments. The danger is apparent. It is that of the moral specialist, who has only one hobby and traces every human ill to strong liquor or tobacco, or the corset, or taxation of personal property, or denial of universal suffrage, or the eating of meat, or the want of the centralization of nearly all initiative and interest and property in the state. The tendency of the accomplished specialist ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of this modification of respiration is the change in dress which is usually made about that time. The young girl is now becoming a woman, and must acquire the art of lacing, wearing a corset, "stays," and sundry other contrivances by means of which to produce a "fine form" by distorting and destroying all natural grace and beauty in ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... harmonious outlines of the figure to advantage, thanks to the large openings in the overcoat. The surcoat, kept back on the shoulders by two narrow bands, became a sort of wide and trailing skirt, which majestically draped the lower part of the body; and, lastly, the external corset was invented, which was a kind of short mantle, falling down before and behind without concealing any of the fine outlines of the bust. This new article of apparel, which was kept in its place in the middle of the chest by a steel busk encased in some rich lace-work, was generally made of fur in ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... she had received from it, on the 1st of January, 1836, a large collection of presents. There were in all no less than fifty-nine articles, among which were the following: a dress-box, a pair of boots, a thermometer, a carbine-carrier, a pair of trousers and a corset. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... poor attempt at dignity, and then collapsed into whining but hopeful lying. She was dressed in an old sunburnt frock. Her hair was tousled, her shoes untied, and a corset-string was hanging outside her skirt. Her front teeth were out, and the red blotches on her face told the ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... crepe de chine lingerie, and hand-woven hose of spun silk. There were boxes upon boxes, and bureau drawers and closet shelves already filled up with hand-embroidered and lace-trimmed creations-chemises and corset-covers, night-robes of "handkerchief linen" lawn, lace handkerchiefs and veils, corsets of French coutil, dressing-jackets of pale-coloured silks, and negligees of soft batistes, trimmed with Valenciennes lace, or even ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... inventor. He offered the sum of twelve hundred and fifty dollars for the machine which Amasa Howe had brought with him, and agreed to pay Elias fifteen dollars per week if he would enter his service, and adapt the machine to his business of umbrella and corset making. As this was his only hope of earning a livelihood, Elias accepted the offer, and, upon his brother's return to the United States, sailed for England. He remained in Mr. Thomas's employ for about eight months, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... what to send you as a Christmas gift, and it seemed a hard problem to solve. I fear you will wonder at what I am sending; but, knowing that you are nearly thirteen years old and must be growing very fast, I have decided to send you a corset. I hope you will like and appreciate it enough ...
— The value of a praying mother • Isabel C. Byrum
... even the least prudish by the abandon of her dancing and the tenuity of her costume, which, we are told, consisted of "a single embroidered garment, fastened beneath the bosom, without the shadow of a corset and without sleeves." And at Naples, where King Joachim Murat gave her a regal reception, with a sequel of fetes and gala-performances in honour of the wife of the Regent of England, she attended a rout, at the Teatro San Carlo, so lightly ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... parents who believe that to play cards or go to theater is the way of Satan find their children leaving home to do these very things. Everywhere mothers wonder why daughters like short skirts, powder and perhaps rouge, when they were brought up on the corset, crinoline and the bustle; and they rebel against the indictment passed out broadcast by their children. "You are old-fashioned; this is the year 1921." When children grow up, their wills clash with their parents', even in the sweetest, and most loving of homes. Behind many a girl's anxiety ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... to ourselves, for though her aunt was present she was only there for decency's sake. After breakfast we resolved to have a ride, and she changed her clothes before me, but also before her aunt. She first put on her leather breeches, then let her skirts fall, took off her corset, and donned a jacket. With seeming indifference I succeeded in catching a glimpse of a magnificent breast; but the sly puss knew how much my ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... must do, Roberta, to disguise your roundness of a young woman? All is lost!" I said to myself in despair. Then a thought came to me. I had never been habited in a corset in my life on account of a prejudice entertained to that garment by my Nannette, but I bethought me to remove that shirt and also the silk one underneath and swath about me one of the heavy towels of the bath. Immediately ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... korespondi. Correspondence korespondado. Corridor koridoro. Corrode mordeti. Corrupt putrigi. Corrupt (bribe) subacxeti. Corrupt (vicious) malvirta. Corruption putro. Corsage korsajxo. Corsair korsaro. Corse malvivulo. Corset korseto. Cortege sekvantaro. Cossack Kozako. Cosmopolite kosmopolita. Cosmography kosmografio. Cost kosto. Costiveness mallakso. Costly multekosta. Costume kostumo. Cosy komforta. Cot liteto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... office to his son and died in the "angelica vestis" of the tertiary order; and the "beatified" Duchess who had sold her jewels to buy corn for the poor during the famine of 1670, and had worn a hair-shirt under a corset that seemed stiff enough to serve all the purposes of bodily mortification. So the file descended, the colours fading, the shadows deepening, till it reached a baby porporato of the last century, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... staying. Can anything more disgraceful be imagined? They all console me by saying there is no one in Baton Rouge who could possibly wear my dresses without adding a considerable piece to the belt. But that is nonsense. Another pull at the corset strings would bring them easily to the size I have been reduced by nature and bones. Besides, O horror! Suppose, instead, they should let in a piece of another color? That would annihilate me! Pshaw! I do not care for the dresses, if they had only left ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... anything," said Mr. Marrier. "Very good amateur actress. Goes about a great deal. Her mother was on the stage. Married a wealthy wholesale corset-maker." ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... Slipslop up, and, after refreshing her spirits with a small cordial, which she kept in her corset, she began in the ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... be necessary to simplify the lessons; in others, an increased number of articles may be prepared in the time allotted. Should the apron and cap not be needed for the cooking class, an undergarment (corset ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Science in Rural Schools • Ministry of Education Ontario
... Madame Arconati, has shown me generous love; a Contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday she came in her holiday dress, a beautiful corset of red silk, richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, on the other a pair of live chickens to be eaten by me for her sake ("per amore mio"), and wanted no present, no reward: it was, as she said, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... pleased him. He took off her furs. Her skirt was of a plum colour so dark that it was almost black, the material thick and supple, outlining her figure, squeezing her arms, making an hourglass of her waist, accentuating the curve of her hips and the bulge of her corset. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... her beauty improved, when decorated with the graceful ornaments worn by the ladies of this country! She was dressed in white muslin, lined with rose-coloured taffeta. Her small and elegant shape was displayed to advantage by her corset, and the lavish profusion of her light tresses were carelessly blended with her simple head-dress. Her fine blue eyes were filled with an expression of melancholy: and the struggles of passion, with which her heart was agitated, flushed her cheek, ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... that she had formerly put into the house. She was determined that her cousin should be as well dressed as Madame Garceland's little girl. She bought the child fashionable boots of bronzed kid like those the little Tiphaines wore, very fine cotton stockings, a corset by the best maker, a dress of blue reps, a pretty cape lined with white silk,—all this that she, Sylvie, might hold her own against the children of the women who had rejected her. The underclothes were quite in keeping with ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... she plunged and found the shoes. Seeing the house still standing, she thought of other things she might need, grasped her tooth brushes and thrust them in her corset. She would certainly need a comb. She added that—a powder bag and lace collar lying on the bureau were also saved. Her hair was tumbling down. She thought of hairpins and tucking ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... a thieving excursion to the stores the female shop-lifter carefully and systematically prepares her clothing, and sees that it is in proper form and ready for business. This she does by first putting on a corset made especially for the purpose, with broad, strong bands which pass over the shoulders. Between her legs she arranges a large bag or receptacle made of some extremely strong cloth, which is suspended from the corset by a stout band running around the waist. Her dress or frock covers this, ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... beholder's eye Your late denuded bindings lie, Subsiding slowly where they fell, A disinvested citadel; The obdurate corset, Cupid's foe, The Dutchman's breeches frilled below. Those that the lover notes to note, And ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... combinations, proceeding outwards, came the corset, a most serious affair. This exceedingly expensive instrument of torture was compounded chiefly of silk (which easily frayed) and whale-bone. Many good women of the middle class have gone to their graves for three hundred years believing ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... terrible corset you have on, which compresses the center of the body, making you look a great deal fatter than you really are, must be taken off, and you must have a corset which any dress maker can fit to you—a corset for the lower ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 3, January 19, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... deformity at that time, although now, it is said, affected by third rate actresses and women of indifferent character only. The waist is an infallible index to the moral worth of a woman; very little of the latter survives the pressure of a tightened corset. ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... over. But the effect on me became constant. Every muscle was almost immovable. I could climb only a few steps without weakening to the stopping-point. I breathed only by gasps, and my heart became violent and feeble by turns. I felt as if cinched in a steel corset. After I had spent ten long minutes and was only half-way up a slope, the entire length of which I had more than once climbed in a few minutes and in fine shape, I turned to retreat, but as there was no cessation of the electrical colic, I faced ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... oblivion, and was like a caged wild thing. Giacinta had to be as a mother with her. The poor trembling girl, who had begun to perceive that the carriage was bearing them to some unknown destination, tore open the bands of her corset and drew her mistress's head against the full warmth of her bosom, rocked her, and moaned over her, mixing comfort and lamentation in one offering, and so contrived to draw the tears out from her, a storm of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was no ordinary woman of Western make. She had been imported from the East by her husband three years before. She had been 'forelady in a corset factory,' when matrimony had enticed her away, and the thought that walked beside her as she baked, and washed, and fed the calves, was that some day she would go 'back East.' And this in spite of the fact that for those parts she ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... clear proof that they could accomplish almost anything within the power of human capacity, for girls have to study under all sorts of disadvantages that boys do not have to contend with. Hang a hoop-skirt on a boy's hips; lace him up in a corset; hang pounds of clothing and trailing skirts upon him; puff him out with humps and bunches behind; pinch his waist into a compass that will allow his lungs only half their breathing capacity; load his head ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... de hem, just a little long, to show good and white 'long wid de blue of de skirt and de red of de underskirt. Dese all come up to my waist and was held together by de string dat held my bustle in place. All dis and my corset was hid by de snow white pleated pique bodice, dat drapped gracefully from my shoulders. 'Round my neck was a string of green jade beads. I wore red stockin's and my foots was stuck in soft, black, ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... places—the window sill, the top bureau drawer, the closet shelf. Beer and sardines were its chief features, with black olives soaked in oil and garlic, cheese straws taken from a corset box, and ripe figs ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... trickled slowly from her closed eyes, whose long black lashes threw their shadows on the transparent whiteness of her cheeks. Over her neck and breast of ivory flowed the golden waves of her magnificent hair, which had come down at the time of her fall. When, as they unlaced her satin corset, less soft, less fresh, less white than the virgin form beneath, which lay like a statue of alabaster in its covering of lace and lawn, one of the horrible hags felt the arms and shoulders of the young girl with her large, red, horny, and chapped hands. Though ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... she said. "To kill you very slow. Your beautiful frock, it burn now. Soon your shoes, your stockings, your long petticoat, the corset shall burn, till there shall not be a shred they can say was yours. And then the body shall be burned—but first carve and chopped like ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... is an adorable, shrill-voiced blonde, a trim, gilded blonde, with a large, fragile body imprisoned in a glittering corset of copper, and having the long, sinewy lines of a cat. Her extraordinary grace is frightening, as, with the sweat of her hot sides rising upwards and her steel muscles stiffening, she puts in motion the immense rose-window ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... completely. His girlish manners made him suspected by the police, who took him for a girl dressed in boy's clothes, and threatened to arrest him. When he was compelled to put on male attire he consoled himself with wearing a woman's chemise and corset underneath. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Arconati, has shown me generous love; a Contadina, whom I have known this summer, hardly less. Every Sunday she came in her holiday dress, a beautiful corset of red silk, richly embroidered, rich petticoat, nice shoes and stockings, and handsome coral necklace, on one arm an immense basket of grapes, on the other a pair of live chickens to be eaten by me for her ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... to get away, for he feared his mother's plaint for money. He knew nothing of the three five-hundred-dollar bills now sewed up in the buxom Leah's corset. ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... fundamental difference between men and women in breathing. Observation of the natural breathing of boys and girls would soon prove the absurdity of this opinion. Owing to the universal use of the corset, thoracic breathing, or chest breathing, the result of the artificial constriction of the body at and below the waist line, appeared to be the natural method of breathing for women, whereas diaphragmatic breathing was recognized as proper and natural for men. Only in recent years have medical ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... unspoiled by heels, pearls, and powder; the domestic animals at play, wild birds singing, and children brought up to colder water than their fathers. It should have been our business to pursue health till we no longer needed the interior of the chemist's shop, the optician's store, the hairdresser's, the corset-maker's, the thousand and one emporiums which patch and prink us, promoting our fancies and disguising the ravages which modern life makes in our figures. Our ambition should have been to need so little that, with our present scientific knowledge, we should have been able to produce ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... an opportune time to demonstrate to what extent serious results may follow mistakes in dressing. The habit of permitting growing girls to constrict the waist, to bind and pull the abdomen by too tight garters, or too tight corset, is wrong, and no mother should permit it. In another part of the book, this matter is taken up more fully, but if it is explained to the girl while she is considering the subject of menstruation, she may more quickly and more fully appreciate ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... the cause of this modification of respiration is the change in dress which is usually made about that time. The young girl is now becoming a woman, and must acquire the art of lacing, wearing a corset, "stays," and sundry other contrivances by means of which to produce a "fine form" by distorting and destroying all natural grace and beauty in the ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... there no harmless potion or powder by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!" Our ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... honour at Rome by the banker Tortonia, the Princess shocked even the least prudish by the abandon of her dancing and the tenuity of her costume, which, we are told, consisted of "a single embroidered garment, fastened beneath the bosom, without the shadow of a corset and without sleeves." And at Naples, where King Joachim Murat gave her a regal reception, with a sequel of fetes and gala-performances in honour of the wife of the Regent of England, she attended a rout, at the Teatro San Carlo, so lightly attired ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... disguise it," said Josephine. "No one would know it was a watch." She liked the idea of having to make a parcel such a curious shape that no one could possibly guess what it was. She even thought for a moment of hiding the watch in a narrow cardboard corset-box that she'd kept by her for a long time, waiting for it to come in for something. It was such beautiful, firm cardboard. But, no, it wouldn't be appropriate for this occasion. It had lettering on it: "Medium Women's 28. Extra Firm Busks." ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... with a red handkerchief tied round her head, how much was her beauty improved, when decorated with the graceful ornaments worn by the ladies of this country! She was dressed in white muslin, lined with rose-coloured taffeta. Her small and elegant shape was displayed to advantage by her corset, and the lavish profusion of her light tresses were carelessly blended with her simple head-dress. Her fine blue eyes were filled with an expression of melancholy: and the struggles of passion, with ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... wouldn't. He had the same kind of mind as Amy and Ethel. He did not like robust and hearty things or robust and hearty people. He wore a corset to keep his hips small, and stood up at teas and receptions with an almost military carriage. Of course he had to sit down at dinners, but he sat very straight. He, too, had family portraits and family silver, ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... in Philadelphia were hand-loom weavers, plasterers, bricklayers, black and white smiths, cigar makers, plumbers, and women workers including tailoresses, seamstresses, binders, folders, milliners, corset makers, and mantua workers. Several trades, such as the printers and tailors in New York and the Philadelphia carpenters, which formerly were organized upon the benevolent basis, were now reorganized ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman
... reported to be his wife, but opinions varied as to which of the eight possessed this honour. These demoiselles were expert dressmakers, and plied many other trades necessary for the beautifying of court ladies. A French corset-maker appeared on the scene, and a famous vender of cosmetics. In fact, there were not wanting all the elements which must ever be at hand for serving the whimsies and necessities of noble dames. The titles of these court purveyors were in the Landhofmeisterin's keeping, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... minute," she said, reaching down into her collar and drawing up a loop of worn ribbon. "Straight front corset," she observed, flushing, "makes a nice pocket for almost everything." She drew up a chamois-skin bag, of an unprepossessing mouse colour, and emptied out a roll of bills. "Two hundred and twelve dollars," she said, proudly, "and eighty-three cents ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... childhood, one of them being: "Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee; busiest thing you ever did see," and the other, "Opens like a barn door, shuts like a trap; guess all day and you can't guess that." In the original versions the answer to the first was "A watch," and to the second, "A corset"—if I recall aright But the joint answer I worked out ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... up in curling "kids," she had met and arranged terms with me on the landing in front of her bedroom door as the housemaid conducted me aloft. Making due allowance for the youth-and-beauty-destroying effects of the kimono, curling "kids," and cold cream, and substituting in their stead a snug corset, an undulated pompadour, and a powdered countenance, respectively, I knew about what to look for in the daylight Miss Jamison. A short, plump, blonde lady in the middle forties, I predicted to myself. The ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... since Carrienta. But I must have first right to her. You hear, first right! I will teach her free of charge. Leave your name and address with my secretary as you go out. Send her Monday at four. Loose clothing. Not even corset waists. Good afternoon. Good-by—Zoe"—placing his hands on her curls as if ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... half open, and gives me a prospect into that of Mad. de L, which is on the opposite side of the passage. She has not yet put on her cap, but her grey hair is profusely powdered; and, with no other garments than a short under petticoat and a corset, she stands for the edification of all who pass, putting on her rouge with a stick and a bundle of cotton tied to the end of it.—All travellers agree in describing great indelicacy to the French women; ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... was not straight-laced. Given the attraction and with it the incentive, and that tam-o'-shanter might have gone flying over the windmill. The tam was very safe. There was no incentive and, though there was no moral corset either, she was temperamentally unable to go poaching on another's preserves. Barring the chimerical, that any girl may consider and most girls do, she was straight as a string. A shabby old man had ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... different causes, of which diseases of bone, including rickets, diseases of joints, and affections of the nervous system attended with paralysis, are amongst the commonest. Other deformities are produced by unsuitable clothing, such as a tight corset, or ill-fitting shoes distorting the toes, prolonged standing in growing subjects overstraining the mechanism of the foot and giving rise to ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... comfortable enough so that she can sleep; yet dressed enough for any emergency. I think a house gown of pretty material much neater than the kimono. Be sure this fits about the shoulders, and never have loose flowing sleeves. A white frill in the neck looks very trim, and is always becoming. The corset and all tight clothes should be removed, stockings and underwear kept on. The hair should be arranged simply, but not allowed to hang in a loose braid, unless you are very sure you will not see any but the patient, and even ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... is making a war saving. There has been no propaganda as yet appealing to women to value dress according to durability and comfort rather than according to its prettiness, to bow to no fashion which means the lessening of power. To corset herself as fashion dictates, to prop herself on high heels, means to a woman just so much lost efficiency, and even the most thoughtless, if appealed to for national saving, might learn to turn by preference in dress, in habits, in recreation, ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... We're goin' to blind her an' lead her in an' count one—two—look! She'll see the cake the very quickest thing! She won't cut off an inch o' the stems, so they're kind of tall up 'n' down, you see. I mean the roses. I've put a corset steel o' Mother's in an' kind of tied 'em to it. I hope you ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... overlook the fact that the Forgotten Man is not infrequently a woman. I have before me a newspaper which contains five letters from corset-stitchers who complain that they cannot earn more than seventy-five cents a day with a machine, and that they have to provide the thread. The tax on the grade of thread used by them is prohibitory as to all importation, and it is the corset-stitchers who have to pay day by day out ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... of her stays, and this angry customer, whose name was Marie Mansel, gave her so shrewd a blow with her fist that the poor little dressmaker died in a week. The canons apparently so sympathised with the annoyances of a badly fitting corset, that they gave Marie Mansel her freedom. But the episode has its value in showing that the modern muscular female is not so new an apparition as she fancies. Tradesmen did not always get the worst of it, however, in such ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... corsets meets the strong disapproval of all Delsarteans, as "control of the breath underlies gesture, walk and voice," and a tightened corset-lace necessarily cramps the breathing power. The tight, high collar is also ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... tinted crepe de chine lingerie, and hand-woven hose of spun silk. There were boxes upon boxes, and bureau drawers and closet shelves already filled up with hand-embroidered and lace-trimmed creations-chemises and corset-covers, night-robes of "handkerchief linen" lawn, lace handkerchiefs and veils, corsets of French coutil, dressing-jackets of pale-coloured silks, and negligees of soft batistes, trimmed with Valenciennes lace, or ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... said Mr. Marrier. "Very good amateur actress. Goes about a great deal. Her mother was on the stage. Married a wealthy wholesale corset-maker." ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... days afterwards with such triumph and magnificence as none others of my quality; the King of Navarre and his troop having changed their mourning for very rich and fine clothes, and I being dressed royally, with crown and corset of tufted ermine, all blazing with crown-jewels, and the grand blue mantle with a train four ells long borne by three princesses, the people choking one another down below to see us pass." The marriage was celebrated on the 18th of ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... anything in Oriental mores which we regard with such horror as Orientals feel for low-necked dresses and round dances. Orientals use dress to conceal the contour of the form. The waist of a woman is made to disappear by a girdle. To an Oriental a corset, which increases the waist line and the plasticity of the figure, is the extreme of indecency—far worse than nudity. It seems like an application of the art of the courtesan to appeal to sensuality.[1408] Perhaps the most instructive ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind And be safe in my corset-lacing. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... herself in the garments of a Japanese lady of position with her hair dressed in the shiny black helmet-shape, and her waist encased in the broad, tight obi or sash, which after all was no more uncomfortable than a corset. Thus attired she came down to dinner one evening, trotting behind her husband as a well-trained Japanese wife should do. In foreign dress she appeared petite and exotic, but one would have hesitated ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... radiance seemed to paint the whole corridor with voluptuous luxury: so much so that it was impossible to believe that the smell came from the lamp. Under the lamp lay Madame Foucault on the floor, a shapeless mass of lace, frilled linen, and corset; her light brown hair was loose and spread about the floor. At the first glance, the creature abandoned to grief made a romantic and striking picture, and Sophia thought for an instant that she had at length encountered life on a plane that would correspond to her dreams ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... form to attract the vulgar gaze of the world. She will not place the corpses of cats or birds on her head. She will not wear mops at the bottom of her dress to sweep up the filth of the earth. She will not wear shoes that injure her as the heathen do. She will not put her body in the vice of a corset, displacing the organs of her body, unfitting her to be a mother, causing more than half the surgical operations in the hospitals. She will then discuss character more than fashion. She will be ashamed of her silly, giggling and meaningless conversation. God said, "a man shall not wear that ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... except one paper, of the most thrilling importance, which never left her person. This small, unobtrusive paper, upon which, according to Madame, the destinies of nations depended, was hidden always—happy paper—in the bosom of her corset. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... embellishments, she presented herself to the eyes of her family and friends with a genuine sensation of guilt. Perhaps three hours out of all her days were spent in some such occupation; between bathing, manicuring, hair-dressing, and intervals with her dressmaker and her corset woman it is improbable that the subject of her appearance was long out of the lady's mind. Yet she was not vain, nor was she particularly well satisfied with herself when it was done. That about one-fifth of her waking time—something more ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... like a woman of Sonnino. Her cap was embroidered with pearls, the pins in her hair were of gold and diamonds, her girdle was of Turkey silk, with large embroidered flowers, her bodice and skirt were of cashmere, her apron of Indian muslin, and the buttons of her corset were of jewels. Two of her companions were dressed, the one as a woman of Nettuno, and the other as a woman of La Riccia. Four young men of the richest and noblest families of Rome accompanied them with that Italian freedom which has not its parallel in any other ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... you read of In these story picture books, They can't ride in roping distance Of that girl in style and looks. They have waists more like an insect, Corset shaped and double cinched; Feet just right to make a watch charm, Small, of course, because they're pinched. This here Nancy's like God made her,— She don't wear no saddle girth, But she's supple as a willow, And the purtiest thing on earth. I'm in earnest; let me ask you— 'Cause I want ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... I had prepared a corset for her, for the same purpose as the King's under-waistcoat, without her knowledge; but she would not make use of it; all my entreaties, all my tears, were in vain. "If the factions assassinate me," she replied, ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... ended in my going into the Temple house and showing Ned's wife how to do up her hair like mine. She looked like another woman when it was puffed softly over her forehead—she has quite pretty brown hair. Then I taught her how to put on her corset and pin her shirt-waist taut in front and her skirt behind. Ned was not to be home until late, and there was plenty of time. It ended in her fairly purring around me, and saying how sorry she was, and ashamed, that she had been ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... the river was a failure, and he went back home. Remembering he had heard me say I could do so much better at corset-making if I could buy goods at wholesale, he sold his Wilkinsburg property and turned the proceeds into dry goods. To me this seemed very unwise, but I tried to make the best of it, and we took a business ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... here. When I come to dress I found the children had cut up my corset into a harness for the dog and Jessup's said they hadn't anybody to send up with a new one and John said he couldn't go because his foot's bad, him having stepped on the rake yesterday afternoon and not wanting to irritate it, so's he could go to work tomorrow as usual. And Grandma's ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... the hour of midnight arrived, the impatient bridegroom springing into his saddle gallops to the house of his friend, and conducted into the presence of his bride instantly rips open her corset with his poniard. This is the conclusion of the ceremony by which is rather cut than tied the Circassian knot of matrimony, there being neither priest nor magistrate employed to ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... 1836, a large collection of presents. There were in all no less than fifty-nine articles, among which were the following: a dress-box, a pair of boots, a thermometer, a carbine-carrier, a pair of trousers and a corset. ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... the cigar, confectionery, and match-making[34] trades. In many of the other trades part of the work is done in factories, part is let out to sweaters, or to women who work at their own homes. Many of the clothing trades come under this class, as for example, the tie- making, trimmings, corset-making trades. The employers in these trades are able to play the out-doors workers against the indoors workers, so as to keep down the wages of both to a minimum. The "corset" manufacture is fairly representative of these trades. The following list gives the per-centage of workers ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... long wondered what to send you as a Christmas gift, and it seemed a hard problem to solve. I fear you will wonder at what I am sending; but, knowing that you are nearly thirteen years old and must be growing very fast, I have decided to send you a corset. I hope you will like and appreciate ...
— The value of a praying mother • Isabel C. Byrum
... of the bear legend wore a beautiful red-brocaded cap. In fact, her attire was altogether remarkable; her skirt, a pretty shade of purple shot with gold silk, was cut in such a way as to form a sort of corset bodice with braces across the shoulders, under which she wore a white chemisette. A beautiful, rich, red silk apron, and a set of well-chosen coloured scarves drawn across the breast completed her costume and added to the fantastic colouring and picturesqueness of the whole. She was ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... object of this invention is to furnish an improved abdominal corset, which supports the weight of the abdomen in a perfectly comfortable and easy manner, and throws the strain on the shoulders and hips of the wearer. The corset is adjustable to the varying conditions of the abdomen, does not interfere with the motion and different positions of the body, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... back to the kitchen, and the thud of her iron was heard as she deftly fluted the ruffles of the crepe blouse. Floss appeared when the meal was half eaten, her hair shiningly coiffed, the pink ribbons of her corset cover showing under her thin kimono. She poured herself a cup of tea and drank it in little quick, nervous gulps. She looked deliriously young, and fragile and appealing, her delicate slenderness revealed by ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... powder canister, with the words 'Royal Baking Powder' thereon. This would appear evidence that in America gunpowder is known and is used by the sovereigns of the various tribes. Here again we see 'The Royal Corset,' and there 'Crown Shirts.' Can it be doubted that the Americans ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... to enhance the effect of architecture by artificial illumination, and to use colored light with a view to its purely pictorial value. Though certain buildings have since been illuminated with excellent effect, it remains true that the corset, chewing-gum, beer and automobile sky signs of our Great White Ways indicate the height to which our imagination has risen in utilizing this Promethean gift in any but necessary ways. Interior lighting, except negatively, has not been dealt with from the standpoint of beauty, but of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... lately," he continued, "to observe the powerful tonic effect of clothes. A woman patient told me once that the moral support, afforded by a well-fitting corset was inconceivable to the mind of a mere man. She said that a corset is to a woman what a hat is to a man— it prepares for any emergency, enables one to meet life on equal terms, and even to face a rebellious cook or janitor with 'that ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... dressed in four absurdities of fashion—a Tight Corset, Tight High-heeled Boots, a Bustle Improver, and ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... these words to a woman, no matter whom, that woman,—who knows that stays will bend,—seizes her corset by the lower end, and bends it out, ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... spread yeourselves areound and squat; take care o' yeour corset strings, and keep deth-ly still. Wall; neow, yeou all sot? Hain't none o' ye been in the pedlin' business, I guess; wall, no matter, tho' it's dread-ful pleasant sometimes: ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... rolled on, this plumpness, encouraged by a tranquil, wholesome life, had insensibly so ill spread itself over the whole of Mademoiselle Cormon's body that her primitive proportions were destroyed. At the present moment, no corset could restore a pair of hips to the poor lady, who seemed to have been cast in a single mould. The youthful harmony of her bosom existed no longer; and its excessive amplitude made the spectator fear that if she ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... bag that an attendant handed him Juve drew out the garments of the dead woman. The shoes were by a good maker, the silk stockings with open-work embroidery, the chemise and the drawers were of fine linen and the corset was ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... there was a rush of rank and fashion to the English watering-places, quite unparalleled in the 'recollection of the oldest inhabitants.' There were blooming widows in every stage of grief and woe, from the becoming cap to the fashionable corset and ball flounce—widows who would never forget the dear deceased, or think of any other man—unless he had at least five thousand a year. Lovely girls, who didn't care a farthing if the man was 'only handsome'; and smiling mammas 'egging them on,' who would look very different when they ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... uses. Feathers, millinery, hair: coiffures, wigs, switches. Class 385, shirts and underclothing for men, women, and children. Class 386, hosiery of cotton, wool, silk, and floss silk, etc.; knitted hosiery, cravats, and neckties. Class 387, corsets and corset fittings. Class 388, elastic goods, suspenders, garters, belts. Class 389, canes, whips, riding whips, sunshades, parasols, umbrellas. Class 390, buttons; buttons of china, metal, cloth, silk, mother-of-pearl or other ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... has been sent to Brussels to finish her education; she is of middle size, stiffly made, body long, legs short, bust much developed but not compactly moulded, waist disproportionately compressed by an inhumanly braced corset, dress carefully arranged, large feet tortured into small bottines, head small, hair smoothed, braided, oiled, and gummed to perfection; very low forehead, very diminutive and vindictive grey eyes, somewhat ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... accurate methods—and one may surely add more common-sense—have changed the whole aspect of the matter. This difference has been proved to be due, not to Nature at all, but wholly to the effect of corset-wearing and woman's conventional dress. There is, it would seem, no limit to the quagmire of superstition and error into which sex-difference have drawn even the most careful inquirers if once they fail to cut themselves adrift ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... put on a gown of her own making,—the secret toil of many a long night,—amateurishly fashioned from some cheap yellow calico the doctor had sent her, yet fitting her wonderfully, and showing every curve of her graceful figure. Unaccented by a corset,—an article she had never known,—even the lines of the stiff, unyielding calico had a fashion that was nymph-like and suited her unfettered limbs. Doctor Ruysdael was profoundly moved. Though a philosopher, he was practical. He found himself suddenly confronted ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... beyond that of the modern man in the degree in which it argues exemption from labor; it also adds a peculiar and highly characteristic feature which differs in kind from anything habitually practiced by the men. This feature is the class of contrivances of which the corset is the typical example. The corset is, in economic theory, substantially a mutilation, undergone for the purpose of lowering the subject's vitality and rendering her permanently and obviously unfit for work. It is true, the corset impairs the personal attractions of the wearer, but the loss suffered ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... shortsighted eyes could not but perceive the living charm of her neck and shoulders, so near to his lips that he need only have bent his head a little to have touched them. He was conscious of the warmth of her body, the scent of perfume, and the creaking of her corset as she moved. He did not see her marble beauty forming a complete whole with her dress, but all the charm of her body only covered by her garments. And having once seen this he could not help being aware of it, just as we cannot renew an illusion we ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... trail her silken robe, And bind her locks with pearls, And one may wreathe the woodland rose Among her floating curls; And one may tread the dewy grass, And one the marble floor, Nor half-hid bosom heave the less, Nor broidered corset more! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... obliterated every sign of sex and made it impossible to image the existence of a fleshy reality beneath the bulk of cloth. Rows of filigree buttons glittered on the cuffs of her jacket; on her breast, crushed flat by a monastic corset which seemed made of iron, shone a triple chain of gold with its enormous links; from beneath the kerchief worn on the head hung her heavy braids tied with ribbons. On the bench, serving as a cushion for her voluminous body, made bulky by skirts, lay the ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and a few of those ravishing stocks that you've been laying in of late wouldn't come amiss. There's that lavender satin waist, too, you bought at Jerome's the other day. I know I should look perfectly killing in it; and—oh! ye Hiltonites!—she has just bought six of the sweetest corset covers you ever laid eyes on; think of it!—six! She could spare three just as well as not, and I'm sure she has at least a dozen pairs of silk stockings, while"- -with a doleful sigh—"I don't own a blessed ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... more in number, the skirts should be hung. The weight comes then on the shoulders, and is evenly distributed there, so that it is not felt. This statement, of course, implies, that the waists are sufficiently large. Moreover, which is only an incidental matter, the waist answers as a corset-cover, and as a dress-protector at the same time, and in the winter, when dresses cannot be washed, it becomes a matter of necessity to have something to answer the latter purpose. In the summer, when low linings are desirable, these ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... him remain seated near her by the fire, until twelve o'clock at night, singing soft refrains, and at every opportunity showed her fair shoulders, and the white temptations of which her corset was full, and casting upon him a thousand piercing glances, all without showing in her face the thoughts that ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... China from the seventh century before Christ. Yamato armour affords little assistance to the archaeologist: it bears no particularly close resemblance to any type familiar elsewhere. There was a corset made of sheet iron, well rivetted. It fastened in front and was much higher behind than before, additioned protection for the back being provided by a lattice-guard which depended from the helmet and was made by fastening strips of sheet iron to leather or cloth. The helmet was usually of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... twelve hundred and fifty dollars for the machine which Amasa Howe had brought with him, and agreed to pay Elias fifteen dollars per week if he would enter his service, and adapt the machine to his business of umbrella and corset making. As this was his only hope of earning a livelihood, Elias accepted the offer, and, upon his brother's return to the United States, sailed for England. He remained in Mr. Thomas's employ for about eight months, and at the ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... when she has to confess that she has never done anything outside of her own house, and nothing there except agreeable things, such as entertaining friends who next week will entertain her, and embroidering 'insets' for corset-covers for dainty ladies who already have corset-covers enough to fill a store-window,—I wonder if she will be able to put it over on the heavenly doorkeeper that 'the Doctor would not let her.' If all I hear is true, Saint Peter will say, 'Who is this person you call the Doctor?' and ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... konvulsio, spasmo. copper : kupro. copy : kopii; ekzemplero. coral : koralo. cord : sxnuro. core : korajxo, internajxo. cork : korko; sxtopi, corn : greno; (foot), kalo. corner : angulo. correct : korekti; gxusta, senerara. correspond : korespondi. corrode : mordeti. corset : korseto. costume : kostumo. cotton : (raw), kotono; (manuf.) katuno. cough : tusi. council : konsilantaro. count : kalkuli; grafo. country : lando; kamparo. courage : kuragxo. course : kuro; kurso. "of"—, kompreneble. court : korto, ("royal"—) kortego; jugxejo; amindumi. ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer
... given over to the tariff. A very indelicate discussion has been had upon corsets. Mr. BROOKS was of opinion that the corset would tariff it were subjected to any more strain in the way of duties. Mr. MARSHALL remarked that the corset avoided a great deal of Waist. It was whalebone of his bone, or something of that sort. It was one of the main Stays of our ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 5, April 30, 1870 • Various
... blood vessels, making them very liable to congestion. Tight clothing or improperly fitted clothing causes pressure and interferes with the circulation. I believe that a large percentage of the objections to the corset originated from women wearing improperly fitted corsets which pushed the organs out of place. A corset fitted to the wearer is not injurious and serves as a support. Overwork, catching cold and excesses may produce ...
— Herself - Talks with Women Concerning Themselves • E. B. Lowry
... their smock they put on a fair corset of pure silk camblet; above that went the petticoat of white, red tawny, or gray taffeta. Above this was the cotte in cloth of silver, with needlework either (according to the temperature and disposition of the weather) of satin, damask, velvet, orange, tawny, green, ash-colored, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... to mend you, St. George! You are cracked all over, and as for me—I'm ready to fall to pieces any minute. I'm all tied up now with corset laces and stays and goodness knows what else. ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... alone, but certainly to him, she is doubly beautiful. Nature indeed had been generous with Coralie Standish-Roe. Nature has her moods and her devilish humours. She was more than amiable when she bestowed her gifts upon Coralie. You may talk about the value of a noble heart beating in an empty corset, shining out of pinched and tired eyes; but it is a value, unmarketable, where the good things in a woman's life are given in exchange. Janet Hallard and her like have learnt the realization of that. And of the qualities ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... conversation suddenly took a peculiar turn. It came about through Mrs. Dawes mentioning that her aunt, who died from eating tinned lobster, used to work in a corset shop in Wych Street. When she said that, The Agent, whose right eye appeared to survey the ceiling, whilst his left eye looked over the other side of ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... been on the whole an advance of knowledge, and improved treatment of specific ailments. The danger is apparent. It is that of the moral specialist, who has only one hobby and traces every human ill to strong liquor or tobacco, or the corset, or taxation of personal property, or denial of universal suffrage, or the eating of meat, or the want of the centralization of nearly all initiative and interest and property in the state. The tendency of the accomplished specialist in medicine is to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a managerial economy for you. The girls in a corset factory in Newark, New Jersey, if not inside when the whistle stopped blowing (at seven o'clock apparently) were locked out till half-past seven, and then they were docked two ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... formerly put into the house. She was determined that her cousin should be as well dressed as Madame Garceland's little girl. She bought the child fashionable boots of bronzed kid like those the little Tiphaines wore, very fine cotton stockings, a corset by the best maker, a dress of blue reps, a pretty cape lined with white silk, —all this that she, Sylvie, might hold her own against the children of the women who had rejected her. The underclothes were quite in keeping with ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... same time assured me that young French women, clad in this airy manner, brave all the rigour of winter. "A simple piece of linen, slightly laced before," said she, "while it leaves the waist uncompressed, answers the purpose of a corset. If they put on a robe, which is not open in front, they dispense with petticoats altogether; their cambric chemise having the semblance of one, from its skirt being trimmed with lace. When attired for a ball, those who dance, as you may observe, commonly put on a tunic, and then a petticoat ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... indeed. Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found that Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the last of the Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Telliere. It was ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... nineteen, had put on a gown of gray silk trimmed with gimp and tassels of a deeper shade of gray, making the front of the gown look like a pelisse. The corsage, ornamented with buttons and caps to the sleeves, ended in a point in front, and was laced up behind like a corset. This species of corset defined the back, the hips, and the bust perfectly. The skirt, trimmed with three rows of fringe, fell in charming folds, showing by its cut and its make the hand of a Parisian dressmaker. A pretty ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... will follow the shape, or mis-shape, of the corsets, and the coat will be built on those lines. The back of the garment should be quite flat, and padding may be needed in the case of hollow backs, as there should be no high water line across the back defining where corset ends and back commences. The collar should fit nicely into the neck at the back, and not gape open from being cut too low. There should be no fulness at the top of the sleeves, for nothing looks more unsightly than "bumpy shoulders" on horseback. It would be well for the wearer when ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... golden wheat sheaf, her eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming I had ordered champagne—we always drank champagne together, because, as we said, it matched so well with her hair—champagne ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... to find Weak points in the flower-fence facing, Was forced to put up a blind, And be safe in my corset-lacing. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... artificial light help sales—no woman over thirty but was grateful for her pink-and-gray room with its soft lights. And Harriet herself conformed to the picture. She took a lesson from the New York modistes, and wore trailing black gowns. She strapped her thin figure into the best corset she could get, and had her black hair marcelled and dressed high. And, because she was a lady by birth and instinct, the result was not incongruous, but refined ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... wappatoo roots under the beds. The dress of the men was like that of the people above; but the women were clad in a peculiar manner, the robe not reaching lower than the hip, and the body being covered in cold weather by a sort of corset of fur, curiously plaited, and reaching from the arms to the hip: added to this was a sort of petticoat, or, rather, tissue of white cedar bark, bruised or broken into small strands and woven into ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: Explorers • Various
... and a dainty room with a bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing-table with a mirror and a switch on it, appears. Seated at it a handsome negress is trying on a brilliant head scarf. Her dressing-gown is thrown back from her shoulders to her chair. She is in corset, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... left off, and still injury, such as they often produce, be equally felt. It is the constriction of dress, that is to be feared, and not any particular article that produces it. A frock, or a belt, may be so tight, as to be even worse than a corset, which would more ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... building, and another still higher rose like a cliff just back of the house in which Roger lived. Still others, and many factory lofts, reared shadowy bulks on every hand. From the top of one an enormous sign, a corset pictured forth in lights, flashed out at regular intervals; and from farther off, high up in the misty haze of the night, could be seen the gleaming pinnacle where hour by hour that great bell slowly ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
Copyright © 2025 Diccionario ingles.com
|
|
|
