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Hectic   /hˈɛktɪk/   Listen
Hectic

adjective
1.
Marked by intense agitation or emotion.  Synonym: feverish.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Hectic" Quotes from Famous Books



... a week later, as old Mr. Naseby sat brooding in his study, that there was shown in upon him, on urgent business, a little hectic gentleman shabbily attired. ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... by his kind words and his charities. He examined, therefore, from the depths of his hiding-place, the nature of that mysterious malady which bent and aged more mortally every day a man but lately so full of life and a desire to live. He remarked upon the cheeks of Athos the hectic hue of fever, which feeds upon itself; slow fever, pitiless, born in a fold of the heart, sheltering itself behind that rampart, growing from the suffering it engenders, at once cause and effect of a perilous situation. The comte spoke to nobody; he did ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... blush, which in the next instant passed away, and left her pale as marble. The few words of introduction over, she sank into total silence; and though she made an effort, from time to time, to smile at Lafontaine's frivolities, it was but a feeble one, and she sat, with pallid lips and a hectic spot on her statue-like cheek, gazing on the carpet. I attempted to take some share in the conversation; but all my powers of speech were gone, my tongue refused to utter, and I remained the most complete and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... art was the art of the ugly. His countenances are so repulsive that they attract. The psychology of the looks, and leers, and grins, and hot, hectic desires on the faces of his women is a puzzle that we can not lay aside—we want to solve the riddle of this paradox of existence—the woman whose soul is mire and whose heart is hell. Many men have tried to fathom it at close range, but we devise ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... losing ten thousand on the stock exchange from sheer folly, finding out that your blood pressure is too high, that your faithful secretary loves you and is truer blue than ever, and discovering at the same moment that you love her yet may not tell her so. Nor is a day so hectic usually concluded by finding an impromptu parlour picnic in full swing at home where rest was sought—finding, too, the full realization that you not only do not love your wife but you do not ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... happier every day, as the golden flood flowed in upon him, but also extremely hectic. He passed the whole day at the tables, and the want of air and exercise, and, still more, the intense excitement which possessed him, began to have the most serious effect. That prescription of "seeing the world," and ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various

... of Royston in the hectic flush of the "good old times." The taking of the census recently suggests a word with regard to the population of the town and how it was ascertained in times gone by. At least, at one decade (1821) the Overseers were paid a penny per head for ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston

... rosy-cheeked hunting squire in his saddle, who, with their half-century of years, yet look so comely, so blooming, so clear-browed, and so smooth-skinned. How often you distrust the weary delicate creature, with the hectic flush of her rouge, in society; and the worn, tired, colourless face of the man of the world who takes her down to dinner. Well, to my fancy, you may be utterly wrong. An easy egotism, a contented sensualism, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... accustomed haunts, waking up its old familiar instincts and inclinations. It was not sleep,—it was not delirium; it was the dream-wakefulness which opium sometimes induces, when every nerve grows tremulously alive, and creates a corresponding activity in the frame, to which it gives a false and hectic vigour. Pisani missed something,—what, he scarcely knew; it was a combination of the two wants most essential to his mental life,—the voice of his wife, the touch of his Familiar. He rose,—he left his bed, he leisurely put on his old dressing-robe, in which he had been wont to ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... a little. When you first knew Brenton, he was a bit uncommon, the ordinary product of Calvinism flavoured with something vastly more hectic. That was inside him, that hectic splash in his blood; it made him imaginative, greedy of new ideas, greedy to prove that they were good. Moreover, he had been trained to believe that an irate Deity of unstable ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... trying to smile; but, oh me! how she looked! Her eyes had no more expression than a China-aster, and her face was so deadly pale, it made the rouge she had put on look like the hectic of a dying consumption. Her ugly was out in full bloom, I tell you. 'Dear cousin Sam,' said she, 'I am so fatigued with my labours as presidentess of this institution, that I can hardly keep my peepers open. I think, if I recollect—for I ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... that day; hardly anything for many breakfasts to follow. In homes containing boys who had actually studied Greek under the mysterious Professor Nicolovius at Mimer's School, discussion grew almost hectic; while at Mrs. Paynter's, where everybody was virtually a leading actor in the moving drama, the ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... sits brooding in his farmhouse near Valley Forge, and his daughter, with a hectic flush on her cheek, looks out into the twilight at the falling snow. She is worn and ill; she has brought on a fever by exposure incurred that very day in a secret journey to the American camp, made to warn her lover of another attempt on the life of Washington, who must ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner

... a wise conclusion, in view of the fact that Edna Pumpelly, nee Haskins, was much better equipped by nature to take care of Mr. Wilfred Edgerton in the hectic environs of a police court than he was qualified to take care of her. And so it was that just as Mrs. Rutherford Wells was about to sit down to tea with several fashionable friends her butler entered, bearing upon a salver a printed paper, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... ma'am," said I, rather taken aback by this style of colloquy "the trees are looking devilishly hectic." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... funds, stayed for all he had before him. "I've got a show for this much," he said, pushing back the side money. "And a pretty good one. Bet your fool heads off! You've got to beat a hectic ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... of Day shakes upon his central seat and turns up his hectic front in dumb questionings of despair. He yearns for sleep to ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer

... not believe that anything ought not to be that was as beautiful as the varied rosy tints of the hectic beauty of the exquisitely shaped and delicately pinked foliage of the field carrots, and with her cousin's assistance she soon had a large bouquet where no two leaves were alike, their hues ranging from the deepest purple or crimson to the palest yellow, or clear scarlet, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the air of conducting the case for the defendant. As he talked he became more and more animated and voluble. The light went out in his tobacco pipe, and a hectic spot appeared in either thin and sallow cheek. Mainwaring sat wondering to hear the severely peaceful Quaker preacher defending so notoriously bloody and cruel a cutthroat pirate as Capt. Jack Scarfield. The warm and innocent ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle

... growled Macy. "With Macdonald back of us and the Guttenchilds back of him, you'll have a hectic time getting anything ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... Redman's Farm. She went out quickly to greet him. The sick man likes the sound of his kind doctor's step on the stairs; and, be his skill much or little, trusts in him, and will even joke a little asthmatic joke, and smile a feeble hectic smile about his ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... that would hardly serve for a dog's kennel in England, baited by a rude peasant-boy, and dependent on the faith of a mercenary ruffian, but I cannot even have time to muse over my own mishap, but must come aloft, frisk, fidget, and make speeches, to please this pale hectic phantom, because she has gentle blood in her veins? By mine honour, setting prejudice aside, the mill-wench is the more attractive of the two—But patienza, Piercie Shafton; thou must not lose thy well-earned claim to be accounted ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott

... "decadents" which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books like Aloysius Bertrand's "Gaspard de la Nuit." Morbid states of passion, the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (serres chaudes); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... with delusive gleams, Till the eye dances in the void of dreams; If passions, following with the winds that urge Earth's wildest wanderer to her farthest verge;— If these on all some transient hours bestow Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow, Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told, Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave Would wail its requiem o'er ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... youth to feed on pleasant thoughts Spite of conviction! I am old and heartless! Yes, I am old—I have no pleasant dreams— 60 Hectic and unrefresh'd with rest. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... fair fields of the high sky, driving the flocculent white masses here and there as listed a changing will. The trees were red and yellow, the leaves firm, full-fleshed, as if the ebbing sap of summer still ran high in every fibre; their tint seemed no hectic dying taint, but some inherent chromatic richness. Fine avenues the eye might open amongst the rough brown boles that stood in dense ranks, preternaturally dark and distinct, washed by the recent rains, and thrown into prominence by the masses of yellow and red leaves carpeting the ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock

... in a shamefaced way protested that some one had passed the "Saddle-up" order, and had a few hectic stinging words addressed to them. Apparently a mounted orderly, galloping past with a message, had shouted out something about the ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)

... banging, exciting region: new factories of hollow tile with gigantic wire-glass windows, surly old red-brick factories stained with tar, high-perched water-tanks, big red trucks like locomotives, and, on a score of hectic side-tracks, far-wandering freight-cars from the New York Central and apple orchards, the Great Northern and wheat-plateaus, the ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... away with increasing apprehensions. Ann had a hectic cough, and many unfavourable prognostics: Mary then forgot every thing but the fear of losing her, and even imagined that her recovery would have ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft

... word; he had smiled at the accusations of sorcery, when applied merely to himself; but when the sublime art, which had been the study and passion of his life, was assailed, he could no longer listen in silence. His head gradually rose from his bosom; a hectic colour came in faint streaks to his cheek; played about there, disappeared, returned, and at length kindled into a burning glow. The clammy dampness dried from his forehead; his eyes, which had nearly been extinguished, ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... vividly a day passed in the chamber of the resigned creature, about two months after the first indication of her illness. Her disease had increased rapidly, and the signs of its ravages were painfully manifest in her sunken eye, her hectic cheek, her hollow voice, her continual cough. Her spirit became more tranquil as her body retreated from the world—her hopes more firm, her belief in the love of her Saviour—his will and power to save her, more clear, and free from all perplexity. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... hectic series of events at Windles, a country house in Hampshire, where Billie's ideals still block the way and Sam comes on ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... his age, the minister of Eccleshall returned to the bosom of his family, with a full anticipation that the distemper under which he lingered would, ere long, prove fatal. His eyes sparkled with more than wonted lustre—his benevolent and intelligent countenance glowed with the delicate hectic flush which so often marks the progress of consumption—and the healthy, but not robust frame of its victim, became emaciated and feeble. The fall of the year 179-, brought the chilling blasts of November to quench the flickering spark of life ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... various methods in keeping the negro in subjection. The organizers of the Ku Klux Klan, shortly after the Civil War, recognized and capitalized on the superstitious nature of the negro. This weakness in their character doubtless prevented much bloodshed during this hectic period. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration

... benefactress was still constantly in his company, and that when Mrs. Melrose was whirled away in her noiseless motor it was generally toward the scene of some new encounter between Fulmer and the arts. On these occasions she sometimes offered to carry Susy to Paris, and they devoted several long and hectic mornings to the dress-makers, where Susy felt herself gradually succumbing to the familiar spell of heaped-up finery. It seemed impossible, as furs and laces and brocades were tossed aside, brought back, and at last carelessly selected from, that anything but the whim of the moment ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton

... abscesses of the lungs, hectic fevers, dry coughs, night sweats, and difficulty of breathing, the balsamic oil and sulphur of this tea is ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith

... desecration of a hallowed spot. When the past has been dead and buried a long while ago there is no sweeter decking for its grave than a rich autumn tangle, all yellow and brown and pale and hectic red, with glossy evergreens and soft, damp moss to keep up the illusion of spring and summer all ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... of about thirty, with somewhat sallow cheeks on which there was now a hectic flush, a high-pitched forehead that seemed to have contracted into a perpetual frown, and colourless eyes. The son of a well-known barrister, he had tried his luck in the City after leaving Cambridge. In a few years the respectable income he had started with had dwindled under the drain of his ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... provides a hectic and scrambled scene to the unaccustomed eye. Hastily presented to a few people, Banneker drifted to one side and, seating himself on a wire chair, contentedly assumed the role of onlooker. The air was full of laughter and greetings and kisses; light-hearted, offhand, gratulatory ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... and hectic red, Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou, Who chariotest to their dark ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various

... her face had faded into two hectic spots on either cheek; there was a lack of all animation in her voice, whether of hope or indignation; she had the air of a person who gave up, who was terribly ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... of the theatricals, and even, temporarily, to the French and painting lessons. If ever maid was grateful for the weary hours of training in fine sewing and embroidery, Janice was, as she toiled, with cheeks made hectic by excitement, over the frock in which her waking thoughts were centred. When finally the day came for the trying on, and it fulfilled her highest expectation, her ecstasy, unable to contain itself, was forced to find expression, and she poured the rapture out in ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... trembling on his lips, the door was thrown violently open, the curtains which concealed it torn asunder, and, with her dark eyes gleaming a strange fire, and two hard crimson spots gleaming high up on her cheek bones—the hectic of fierce passion—her bosom throbbing, and her whole frame dilated with anger and excitement, young ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... desire hope. We may expect misfortune, sickness, poverty, while from these evils we would fain escape. Bending over the couches of the sick and suffering, we may desire their restoration to health, while the hectic flush and the rapid beating of the heart assure us that no effort of kindness or skill can prolong their days upon the earth. Hope is directed to some future good, and it implies not only an ardent desire that our future may be fair and unclouded, but an expectation ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams

... point a slender, beardless young chap, with bright black eyes, and hectic cheeks, engaged in sketching one of the miners who posed before him. His touch was swift and sure, and his faculty at catching a likeness remarkable. The sketch was completed and paid for in ten minutes; and he was immediately besieged by ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... the skin is intact, the abscess is unattended with symptoms, and may escape notice. If it bursts externally, pyogenic infection is almost inevitable, and the patient gradually passes into the condition of hectic fever or chronic toxaemia; he loses ground from day to day, may become the subject of waxy disease in the viscera, or may die of exhaustion, tuberculous meningitis, ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... Hodges, being drawn up in the same way as before, was conducted to Amabel's chamber. She was reclining in an easy-chair, with the Bible on her knee; and though she was much wasted away, she looked more lovely than ever. A slight hectic flush increased the brilliancy of her eyes, which had now acquired that ominous lustre peculiar to persons in a decline. There were other distressing symptoms in her appearance which the skilful physician well knew how to interpret. To an inexperienced eye, however, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... herself upon a couch, and gave way to her cheerless thoughts; her eyes were closed, but ever and anon a large tear burst through the closed lids and rolled down the wasted cheeks, which already the hectic flush, so fatally significant, had dyed with ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various

... A hectic hue is on my feverish cheek, And slowly throbs my pulse—but it will cease; And cease, too, will the visions instinct, Impalpable, and deep, that haunt my soul! Death, who can dash the chalice from the lips Of Pleasure's votary, and hush the lyre While poetry is breathing on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 564, September 1, 1832 • Various

... lay, and on his thin worn cheek A purple hectic play'd like dying day On the snow-tops of distant hills; the streak Of sufferance yet upon his forehead lay, Where the blue veins look'd shadowy, shrunk, and weak; And his black curls were dewy with the spray, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... wore away. Pauline grew up a queen. A shadow fell across my sunny path;— A hectic flush burned on my mother's cheeks; She daily failed and nearer drew to death. Pauline would often come with sun-lit face, Cheating the day of half its languid hours With cheering chapters from the holy book, And ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... of medium height, and lean, with a clean-shaven face, hollow cheeks, and black, sunken eyes. His hair was grey and thin, his looks wild and wandering, and the hectic colouring of his face and narrow chest showed that he was far gone in consumption. Even as Lucian looked at him he was shaken by a hollow cough, and when he withdrew his handkerchief from his lips the white linen was ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... harlequin crowd at Maxim's—a noisier, tenser, more hectic crowd than at the Riche. The room was gray with smoke, and everywhere she looked were gold-tipped wine bottles. Though it was still early, there was much hysterical laughter and much tossing about of long streamers of colored ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... A hectic half-hour followed. Then, "Okay, boys and girls, I love you, too, but let's cut out the slurp and sloosh, get some supper and log us some sack time. I'm just about pooped. Sorry I had to queer the private-residence ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith

... refuge of those who have nothing to say to each other; but the evident uneasiness and confusion of the young lady prevented her from joining freely in it. Her large, bright eyes strayed restlessly around the room. A hectic flush alternated on her cheeks with deathly pallor, and the smile, which occasionally played around her lips, seemed but a painful expression of mental suffering. Suddenly she raised her head, as ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach

... mourner, the stillness of death, And she stirs them, and calls, for she deems it too deep; But again does she hush them, first telling them pray, Till at length overcharged by the tears yet unshed, Will she sink, and as consciousness passes away, O'er her pale furrowed cheek, see the hectic o'erspread. ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny

... Alas! no. And if I showed you satisfactorily that sin against the organic laws caused so great a proportion of blindness, how much more readily will you grant that the same sin gives to so many of our population the narrow chest, the hectic flush, the hollow cough, which makes the victim doomed, by his parent, to consumption and early death! Do you not see, every Sabbath, at church, the young man or woman, upon whose fair and delicate structure the peculiar ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew

... them win the race.' "Such was the doctrine our young prophet taught; And here conviction, there confusion wrought; When his thin cheek assumed a deadly hue, And all the rose to one small spot withdrew, They call'd it hectic; 'twas a fiery flush, More fix'd and deeper than the maiden blush; His paler lips the pearly teeth disclosed, And lab'ring lungs the length'ning speech opposed. No more his span-girth shanks and quiv'ring thighs Upheld a body of the smaller size; But down he sank upon his dying bed, And gloomy ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe

... in loss would have been insufferable; he could not have borne it; he could never have surrendered her. Moreover, a happy present effect was the result. He conjured up the anticipated chatter and shrug of the world so vividly that her beauty grew hectic with the stain, bereft of its formidable magnetism. He could meet her calmly; he had steeled himself. Purity in women was his principal stipulation, and a woman puffed at, was not the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... was one of the frank displays of human hopes, yearnings, and vanities, that sometimes take place on steamboats. Feathers had a hectic brilliancy that proved secret, dumb longings. Pendants known as "lavaleers" hung from necks otherwise innocent of the costly fopperies of Versailles. Old ladies clad in princess dresses with yachting caps worn ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... "Hectic, hectic! dear me, dear me!" murmured Aunt Myra, as the shadow of her gloomy bonnet fell upon Rose, and the stiff tips of a black glove touched the cheek where the colour deepened ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott

... longer for the matter of that; and it was not until the darkness of the evening had drawn down, coming along early with the howling gloom of the storm-shrouded ocean, without so much as a rusty tinge of hectic to tell us where the West lay, that we abandoned our idle task of staring at the sea, and made up our minds to go through with the night as ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... loosely-strung moral sketches, with no unity but that of spirit, as also in the homely force and boldness of the writing; and if Pollok in aught differ from Blair, it is partly in the length of his poem and its elaboration, and partly in that feverish, hectic heat, and that morbid intensity and fury of temperament, which are the sources of much of Pollok's strength, and of more of his weakness. No poem on any similar subject, in our time, can be named with Blair's, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... violet-ink hued gown, to fury of internecine strife amid the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan,—from the austere and wistful beauty of the grey, long-backed Norman Abbey rising above the roofs and chimneys of the little English market-town, to the fierce hectic splendour of Eastern cities blistering in the implacable sun-glare of the Indian plains. Days on the Harchester playing fields, days on the river at Oxford, and still earlier days in the Rectory nursery at home; bringing with them sense of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... Pathological indications manifested by the mouth are principally displayed by the lips, which are clear red in healthy people, while a hectic red indicates fever and pulmonary disease. Pale lips indicate anaemia and chlorosis, and lips of a bluish hue are signs of a generally weakened organism. Frequent, vivid contractions of the lips (usually thin in this ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann

... young just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested incident. We lose by the slow ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... to be removed, but also in pulmonary and bronchial consumption, in which it counteracts effectually the troublesome cough; and I am enabled with perfect truth to express the conviction that Du Barry's Revalenta Arabica is adapted to the cure of incipient hectic complaints and consumption. ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 209, October 29 1853 • Various

... the habit of transferring the limitations of the nervous temperament and of hectic constitutions to the great Source of all the mighty forces of nature, animate and inanimate. We may confidently trust that we have over us a Being thoroughly robust and grandly magnanimous, in distinction from the Infinite Invalid ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... she would rally a little, and at such times she would insist upon being propped up and allowed to talk, and her eyes would grow large and bright, and a spot of hectic color would burn on her cheeks. She did not even mention her trouble during the first two days of Aimee's visit, but on the third afternoon she surprised her by broaching the subject suddenly. She had been dozing, and on awakening ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... With woes far heavier than the ponderous tomb That weighed upon her gentle dust: a cloud Might gather o'er her beauty, and a gloom In her dark eye, prophetic of the doom Heaven gives its favourites[481]—early death—yet shed A sunset charm around her, and illume With hectic light, the Hesperus of the dead, Of her consuming cheek ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... can steadily maintain the clear vision of what the beloved one really is, and can patiently view the wearisome ebullitions of ill-temper and discontent as symptoms equally physical with a cough or a hectic flush. ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... hours since —he passed the same splendid bridge on which he had stood despairing, to quit it revived—he gained the Rue Faubourg St. Honore. A young man in a cabriolet, on whose fair cheek burned the hectic of late vigils and lavish dissipation, was rolling leisurely home from the gaming-house, at which he had been more than usually fortunate—his pockets were laden with notes and gold. He bent forwards as Morton passed him. Philip, absorbed in his reverie, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... strange, that he should breathe and walk, Feed with digestion, sleep, enjoy his health, And, like a boisterous whale swallowing the poor, Still swim in wealth and pleasure! is't not strange? Unless his house and skin were thunder proof, I wonder at it! Methinks, now, the hectic, Gout, leprosy, or some such loath'd disease, Might light upon him; of that fire from heaven Might fall upon his barns; or mice and rats Eat up his grain; or else that it might rot Within the hoary ricks, even as it stands: Methinks this ...
— Every Man Out Of His Humour • Ben Jonson

... hectic flush came over his chalky countenance, whilst a sardonic smile played over his features. "You can speak low enough now. 'Tis a pity that primogeniture is so little regarded in his Majesty's vessels of war; but ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard

... hast thou learnt at last to jazz? Come take my arm, my clomplish boy;" O hectic day! Cheero! Cheeray! He chwinckled in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... Frances or Gilbert to see the wood for the trees in their new environment, and it was the greatest good fortune that the year of Frances's reception was also that of the new simplification following upon Dorothy's arrival. For the preceding few years had resembled the hectic period of the lionising of the young Chesterton of 1904. Requests poured in, for lectures, for articles, for introductions to books. "Are there no other Catholics to do things?" Frances asked me rather plaintively. Of these years Monsignor Knox ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... For three hectic quarters, with the tide of victory or defeat now surging towards Bliss—now towards Sloan, the battle raged. As play after play of brilliance or superbrilliance flashed forth, the stands alternately groaned or cheered, according to the sympathies of each. Robertson, a veritable stonewall ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... and major by turns, with some hautboy wailing, paints the sufferer's sorrows. A duet by the lovers, "Parigi, O cara," is especially original in its peroration. The closing trio has due culmination and anguish, though we would have preferred a quiet ending to a hectic shriek and a doubly loud force in ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... vessel's keel There lies a yawning grave, Around whose bark the wint'ry winds Like fiends of fury rave!—Oh, while ye feel 'tis hard to toil And labor long hours through, Remember, it is harder still To have no work to do! 4 Ho, ye upon whose fevered cheeks The hectic glow is bright, Whose mental toil wears out the day, And half the weary night, Who labor for the souls of men, Champions of truth and right!—Although ye feel your toil is hard, Even with this glorious view, Remember, it is harder still To have no work to do! 5. Ho, all ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders

... Mary had accomplished her object of undoing the door in spite of the old man's exertions, and Feemy entered weary and worn, soiled with the road, and pale and wan in spite of the hectic flush which reddened ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope

... must from his appearance have been in early life more than usually robust, had been for some time gradually giving way, without the intervention of any apparent disease: he had neither cough nor hectic, yet he became daily more enfeebled: his habits were temperate, and he neither declined nor complained of fatigue; yet he was evidently wasting away: he became more and more silent and sleepless, and at length so seriously altered, that my alarm grew ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... his patient, soon saw that he was about to have his hands full. The hectic flush of fever began to chase away the deadly pallor from the sufferer's cheek; his eyes glittered and sparkled like coals of fire; and as feeling began to return to his hitherto benumbed limbs, and the smart of his recent operation made itself ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood

... Last, but not least, the translucent tissues, the semi-transparent skin, barely veiling the pulsating mesh of myriad blood-vessels, is a superb color index, painting in vivid tints—"yellow, and ashy pale, and hectic red"—the living, ever changing, moving picture of the vigor of the life-centre, the blood-pump, and the richness of its crimson stream. Small wonder that the shrewd advice of a veteran physician to the medical ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... now in a condition of hectic activity and offers a plethora of attractions. A recent analysis of the waters shows that the proportion of sapid ovaloid particles and sulphuretted trinitrotoluene is larger than ever. Lieutenant Platt- Stithers' stincopated anthropoid orchestra plays ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various

... this unlike other such banquets, was that no one could help perceiving how much less the bridegroom was the hero of the day to the tenants than was the hectic young man who presided over the feast, and how all the speeches, however they began in honour of Captain Evelyn, always turned into wistful good auguries ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Faith busied herself with their frugal supper. Before the meal was over she was pleased to see that her mother was becoming more composed and natural. When Miss Jennings came in both ladies greeted her warmly. There was a hectic glow in her cheeks, and ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon

... the world of men, Thenceforth His servant vowed!"' When ceased that voice There fell upon the monks a crisis strange; And where that Pilgrim looked for joy, behold, Doubt, wrath, and anguish! Faces old long since Grew older, stricken as by hectic spasm, So fierce a pang had clutched them by the throat; While drops of sweat on many a wrinkled brow Hung large like dewy beads condensed from mist On cliffs by torrents shaken. Mute they sat; Then sudden rose, uplifting helpless hands, As when from distant rock sore-wounded men, Who all day ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere

... country, I believe. This expression she has naturally—and something more than this. In short, I cannot describe the effect of this kind of eye—at least upon me. Her features are regular, and rather aquiline—mouth small—skin clear and soft, with a kind of hectic colour—forehead remarkably good; her hair is of the dark gloss, curl, and colour of Lady J——'s; her figure is light and pretty, and she is a famous songstress—scientifically so; her natural voice (in conversation, I mean,) is very sweet; and the naivete of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various

... his desire for fresh air and freedom grew to a great longing. One hot day, whose ardours, too strong for the leaves whose springs had begun to dry up, were burning them "yellow and black and pale and hectic red," the fancy seized him to get out of the garden with its clipt box-trees and cypresses, into the meadow beyond. There a red cow was switching her tail as she gathered her milk from the world, and looking ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... out again in the wedding-frock of chiffons, very tumbled now, looking sweet but with the hectic flush of her ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... have found their natural effect in making her indifferent to the course of the trial, or even to its issue. And so, perhaps, in the main, they did. But at times some lingering sense of outraged dignity, some fitful gleams of old sympathies, 'the hectic of a moment,' came back upon her, and prevailed over the deadening stupor of her grief. Then she shone for a moment into a starry light—sweet and woful to remember. Then——but why linger? I hurry ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... shower, for I believe the colors of Goodloe's pageant would run and I'd like to see the true hue of this melee of his come out in the wash. It would do Charlotte good to fade a bit. She has been hectic since daylight and the rest of my juvenile family with her. Jimmy is S and Z in the alphabet and Sue has got a huge A sewed on her back. Goodloe intends that education shall be nailed ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... and her glance strayed down the wall opposite until it rested on Nan. She examined the girl speculatively. Nan was apparently completely absorbed in Ben Sansome; but there was in her manner something feverish, hectic, a mere nothing, which did not escape Mrs. Sherwood's ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White

... future mobs, where wretched life is crushed to deeper wretchedness by the avaricious exaction of unfeeling landlords[10] worse than those against whom the Irish rebel. Is not the splendor of such a city like the hectic flush on the consumptive's cheek? The statistics of the past year reveal the startling fact that New York is a decaying city; that its population has no natural growth, but had 853 more deaths ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various

... him the hold on her which she admits too easily. More than once, we find a summary swiftness in the motives alleged, for things done before the spectators have time to grasp the reasons for these deeds, which therefore appear to be arbitrary. There is a hectic flush of romanticism in this play, not discernible in any other of Ibsen's social dramas, a perfervidness, an artificiality, which may not interfere with the interest of the story but which must detract from its plausibility at least and ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... always off at "half-cock," running his head into danger whenever he can, and who is extremely hectic in his make-up, is always a problem. He needs a strong hand. Sometimes he will need even physical repression, but he always demands great care and patience. The Teacher should deal with each class of boys largely by suggestion, but in ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander

... it was all over—all but calling the wagon. That was the worst yet. One of their slugs struck directly in front of my left eye—it was kinda funny, at that, seeing it splash—and I thought I was inside a boiler in a riveting shop when those machine-guns cut loose. It was hectic, all right, while it lasted. But one thing I'll tell the attentive world—we're not doing all the worrying. Very few, if any, of the gangsters they send after us are getting back. Wonder what they think when they shoot at us and we ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... a hectic flush; his heart was beating with the exhilaration of an old war-horse. Looking over Tom's shoulder, he squinted into the distance, his underlip quivering against ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer

... The hectic flush of the dying day was reflected on the window high above the altar, and, burning through the red mantle of the Christ, fell down upon the marble ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... For several hectic minutes the air was thick with buns, It was almost as bad, so he told me, as the shelling of the Huns, But our gallant Tennysonian held on until a clout In the eye from a metal teapot ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various

... misfortunes. Henry Meynell was never mentioned, but his handiwork was plainly seen. Kate had rapidly grown old; the look of radiant happiness and trustingness was gone. Her spirits were not altogether depressed, but rather subject to pitiful variations; and at times the hectic excitement of her manner was even more distressing than her fits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... It is chiefly expressed in negatives: there will be no priests, no kings, no marriage, no war, no cruelty—man will be "tribeless and nationless." Though the earth will teem with plenty beyond our wildest imagination, the general effect is insipid; or, if there are colours in the scene, they are hectic, unnatural colours. His couples of lovers, isolated in bowers of bliss, reading Plato and eating vegetables, are poor substitutes for the rich variety of human emotions which the real world, with all its admixture of evil, actually ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... floors will not be polished mirrors nor skating-rinks. They will be just plain and common hardwood floors. Beautiful carpets are not beautiful to the mind that knows they are filled with germs and bacilli. They are no more beautiful than the hectic flush of fever, or the silvery skin of leprosy. Besides, carpets enslave. A thing that enslaves is a monster, and monsters are ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... for even her naturally sound and elastic constitution. Her health gave way irrecoverably. Her face grew thin and wan without losing any of its spiritual beauty, as her soul looked through its ever more transparent covering, which daily grew more and more aetherialized as she faded away. A hectic flush, like a spot of fire, came and went for a time, and at last settled permanently upon her cheek. Her eyes, those glorious orbs, filled with unquenchable love, grew supernaturally large and brilliant with the flames ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... sparingly used by Raphael and his scholars, had come into fashion in Domenichino's time, for 'painters and poets sought for passionate emotion, and these subjects (martyrdoms) supplied them with plentiful food.' Sensationalism is the florid hectic of art's decay, whether ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler

... blood spurted to the ground. Both the great heads were undistinguishable masses of blood. Their hot breath hung frozen in the air. The western sun turned all the world beneath the aspens to crimson. The betting became more general and more hectic as the battle waxed more furious. The Mormons forgot their grievance for the moment ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie

... seated on a couch, in his night-gown and slippers. Oldbuck was shocked at the change which had taken place in his personal appearance. His cheek and brow had assumed a ghastly white, except where a round bright spot of hectic red formed a strong and painful contrast, totally different from the general cast of hale and hardy complexion which had formerly overspread and somewhat embrowned his countenance. Oldbuck observed, that the dress he wore belonged to a deep mourning suit, and a coat of the same colour hung on a chair ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott

... blaze of ruddy rubies; nor looked stern-white like Media's pearls; but cast a green and yellow glare; rays from emeralds, crossing rays from many a topaz. In those beams, so sinister, all present looked cadaverous: Abrazza's cheek alone beamed bright, but hectic. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... from the old school-room With a wistful look of a long June day, When on my cheek was the hectic bloom Caught of Mischief, as I presume— He had such a "partial" way, It seemed, toward me.—And again I thought Of a probable likelihood to be Kept in after school—for a girl was caught Catching ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley

... drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and steeples of the ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... was carried forward. No other lights, and no movement, rose from the river; no sound was audible at their back. The city, from the evidence of Jasper Penny's sensibilities, did not exist; it had fallen out of his consciousness; suddenly its bricked miles, its involved life stilled or hectic, stealthy in the dark, seemed a thing temporary, adventitious; he had an extraordinary feeling of sharing in a permanence, a continuity, outlasting stone, iron, human tradition. He had been swept, he thought, into a movement where centuries were but the fretful ticking ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... have caught her hands and looked into her beautiful face. To-morrow he would send the letter. To-morrow? Why, yes, to-day, like all to-days in the removed and placid light of all to-morrows, would be shown needlessly hectic. Ten to one something would have happened in the night to make to-day look foolish. If nothing had happened, if it still was war, it could only be a swiftly over business, a rapid and general recognition of the impossibility of ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... loved, of course, and the deeper, because secretly and without permission: they were too young to marry, and indeed had thought little of the matter; still, substance and shadow, body and soul, were scarcely more needful to each other, or more united. But—a hacking cough—a hectic cheek—a wasting frame, were to blue-eyed Mary the remorseless harbingers of death, and Eustace, standing on her early grave, was in heart a widower: henceforth he had no aim in life; the cloister was—so thought ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... in the extreme. His beautiful black hair had been shorn away at the temples to permit his wound to be dressed, and his head was enveloped in bandages, stained in many places with blood; his face was pale as death, save a bright hectic spot in the centre of each cheek, fatal evidence of the inward fever which was consuming him. His classical features, already pinched and shrunken, their paleness enhanced by contrast with his black whiskers, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... door, now as cautiously advanced; listened to hear her daughter breathe; and then gently raised the handkerchief. Jane started. Afraid of disturbing her, Mrs. Adair remained some time with fixed attention, holding the handkerchief from her face. A hectic flush was upon her cheeks; but her countenance was placid and happy. When she returned into her own chamber, Elizabeth was there, who anxiously inquired if she had seen her sister. "But have you taken leave of her?" ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown

... annoyance, "the Nurse;" but, as we believe, there are thousands of excellent wives and mothers who pass through life without even a temporary embroglio in the kitchen, or suffering a state of moral hectic the whole time of a nurse's empire in the nursery or bedroom. Our own experience goes to prove, that although many unqualified persons palm themselves off on ladies as fully competent for the duties they so rashly and dishonestly undertake to perform, and thus expose themselves ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... (Good humor should prevail!) I'll fit you with a tale Whereto is tied a moral. Once on a time a certain English lass Was seized with symptoms of such deep decline, Cough, hectic flushes, every evil sign, That, as their wont is at such desperate pass, The doctors ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton

... to be going against you, get up a hectic cough, which is easily imitated, and look acutely miserable, which you ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... there was the look of one who has seen some horrible thing, though she gave her orders with coherence and decision as usual, and with great deftness she assisted her maid in the hasty toilette. Her face was very pale, save for one or two hectic spots which took the place of the nectarine bloom so seldom absent from her cheeks, and in its place was a new, shining, strange look like a most delicate film—the transfiguring kind of look which great ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... look toward the others beyond them. They seemed engrossed for the moment in some hectic discussion over fashions, and he dropped his voice to a confidential pitch: "I can't talk Billy with the others; I'm too much cut up over the whole thing to stand hearing them hold an autopsy over Billy's character and motives." He stopped abruptly ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer

... world: the voices of friends, the harmonies of music, the chime of falling waters, the solemn roll of ocean, the silver splendour of the moon, the golden glories of sunset, the verdure of summer woods, and the hectic tints of autumn—all these subsist only in our own minds, and if we imagine them to have any reality elsewhere, we deceive ourselves. In fact the whole external world as perceived by us is one great illusion: if we gave the reins to ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... exceptionally hectic day. Enoch had been summoned before the Senate Committee on appropriations, and with the director of the Reclamation Service had endured a grilling that had had some aspects of the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... the village church, and the milk-maids, returning from the fields, would now and then overhear her singing some plaintive ditty in the hawthorn walk. She became fervent in her devotions at church, and as the old people saw her approach, so wasted away, yet with a hectic gloom and that hallowed air which melancholy diffuses round the form, they would make way for her as for something spiritual, and looking after her, would shake ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... his poor mamma almost frightened him, as she leaned her elbow upon the pillow and gazed at him so long and so sadly, while her thin white hands restlessly pushed back her beautiful, disordered hair, and two red hectic spots burned ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... wife from the highest motives. We do not take him so seriously: we are satisfied that he wrote the story first and discovered its morality afterwards; and that lofty motives would not have united him to Miss Rosina Doyle Wheeler had she not been pretty and clever. His hectic letters to his mamma; his Byronic struttings and mouthings over the grave of his schoolgirl lady-love; his eighteenth-century comedy-scene with Caroline Lamb; his starched-frill participation in the Fred Villiers ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... twelve hectic hours later after time lost initially in shaking, bouncing and beaming the new substance on the outside chance it might develop a ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael

... dare to issue the semi-prurient style of novel at present so rife in England; the columns of the leading magazines are almost prudishly closed to anything suggesting the improper. The tone of the stage is distinctly healthier, and adaptations of hectic French plays are by no means so popular, in spite of the general sympathy of American taste with French. The statistics of illegitimacy point in the same direction, though I admit that this is not necessarily ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... and wan, A pale consumptive coughed with labored breath, His sunken eyes and hectic flush upon His cheek, foretold a sure but lingering death; I thought, whene'er I met his hollow stare, A wasting death like that ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... you all alone! It's a perfect shame! But I've planned it all out for everybody! Father's Lay Reader, of course, will take the Christmas service! We'll just have to omit the Christmas Tree surprise for the children!... It's lucky we didn't even unpack the trimmings! Or tell a soul about it." In a hectic effort to pack both a thick coat and a thin coat and a thick dress and a thin dress and thick boots and thin boots in the same suit-case she began very palpably to pant again. "Yes! Every detail is all planned out!" she asserted with a breathy sort ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... large dress- maker, at any time, by a certain neatness of cheap finery and humble following of fashion, which pervade her whole attire; but unfortunately there are other tokens not to be misunderstood—the pale face with its hectic bloom, the slight distortion of form which no artifice of dress can wholly conceal, the unhealthy stoop, and the short cough—the effects of hard work and close application to a sedentary employment, upon a tender frame. They turn towards the fields. The girl's countenance ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens

... There was no too modern uneasiness about it, no trifling, gim-crack furniture constructed to catch the eye and the angles of any one venturing to seek repose upon it, no unmeaning rubbish of ornaments or hectic flummery of second-rate pictures. Above the high oaken mantel-piece was a little pure bust in marble of the Prophet when a small boy. To right and left were pretty miniatures in golden frames of the Prophet's delightfully numerous grandmothers. Here might be seen ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to very early frosts, as is also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it has a serious root ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... cliff's impending brow, With trembling step, the Hectic paus'd awhile; As round his wasted form the sea-breeze blew, His flush'd cheek ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr

... Blair's room, which he remembered almost as well as his own, though now it was in disorder. Blair was in his shirt sleeves. He looked both gay and spent. Red Payson was in bed, and his face bore the hectic flush of fever. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... and those for whom she speaks (she is a real spokeswoman) may be well assured. Whatever be the surface mood of the moment, whatever the passing effect of war's hectic atmosphere, nothing is more deeply realised throughout Ireland than the need to restore the old ways, the old friendships—the need to bring back the gentry to their old uses in Ireland, and to so much of leadership as should be theirs by right of fitness. When the history of the Irish Convention ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn

... in his good nature, to refuse her. And he sat there and read the long letters. Read Sibylla's. Before the last one was fully accomplished, Lionel's cheeks wore their hectic flush. ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... reigns where knowledge should preside, Feuds are increased, and learning laid aside. Thus synods oft concern for faith conceal, And for important nothings show a zeal: The drooping sciences neglected pine, And Paean's beams with fading lustre shine. No readers here with hectic looks are found, Nor eyes in rheum, through midnight watching, drowned; The lonely edifice in sweats complains That nothing there ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... disregarded them too long. They had never been familiarized with him; seldom saw him, and were kept under restraint in his presence; and there was no intimacy to counteract the fright inspired by his present appearance. Ghastly pale, with a hectic spot on each cheek, with eyes unnaturally bright and dilated, and a quantity of black hair and whiskers, he was indeed a formidable object to the little girls; and Violet was more grieved than surprised when Annie screamed ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... years of Toru's life were spent in the old garden-house at Calcutta, in a feverish dream of intellectual effort and imaginative production. When we consider what she achieved in these forty-five months of seclusion, it is impossible to wonder that the frail and hectic body succumbed under ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... in Tahiti, and though the bars were only adjuncts of the shows, they had become the scenes of a hectic life quite different from former days. The groves, the beach, and the homes were less frequented for merrymaking, the white having brought his own comparatively new customs of men and women drinking together in public houses. And there had crept in on a small scale ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... dizzyingly, terrifyingly much had happened. The pleasant little comedy of life at El Pozo had changed to melodrama, crude and strident. They had been attacked by a band of insurrectos, a wing of Villa's hectic army, presumably; the peons, with the exception of the house servants and Yaqui Juan, had gone gleefully over to the enemy; Richard King had been wounded in his hot-headed defense of his hacienda, shot through the shoulder, and was running a temperature; the telephone wires were cut; ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell

... garrulity, gesticulate, gormand, granivorous, grandiloquent, gravamen, gratuitous, gregarious, habitue, hallucination, harbinger, hardihood, heckle, hectic, hedonist, hegemony, heinous, herbivorous, heretic, hermaphrodite, heterodox, heterogeneous, hibernate. histrionic, hoidenism, homiletics, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... flung a sudden glow of yellow light athwart the sidewalk as its swinging doors jerked apart; and a form lurched out into the night; there, from a dance-hall came the rattle of a tinny piano, the squeak of a raspy violin, a high-pitched, hectic burst of laughter; while, flanking the street on each side, like interjected inanimate blotches, rows of squalid tenements and cheap, tumble-down frame houses silhouetted themselves in broken, jagged points against the sky-line. And now and then a man spoke to her—his untrained fingers fumbling ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard

... streets, the homeless wind; and the toiling multitudes that made such delights possible, and gave of their dreary, sordid labour that we might sit thus at ease. The whole thing seemed artificial, soulless, hectic, unreal. One could not help thinking of Dives and Lazarus, that strange parable that has so stern a moral. "But now he is comforted and thou art tormented." It is not suggested there that vice is punished and virtue rewarded; merely that wealth ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... their long journey. All paused to welcome the invalid, as she joined them with a slow, feeble step; yet she looked better than she had done since leaving her home. Restlessly she had tossed on her hard couch, and now the hectic flush mantled the thin cheek and brightened the deep blue eyes. The warm congratulations of her friends on her improved appearance brought a sad smile to her lip, and the expression of Dr. Bryant's countenance told her that he at least ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans

... use Wims. Why? Suddenly, into his mind flashed the scene of the general calling Wims from behind the tree and he knew what it was that had been screaming for attention at the back of his mind these last hectic minutes. No one had mentioned Wims' name within earshot of the general and yet Fyfe had ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia

... the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the bed wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody

... gustily, his cheeks flamed, the hectic burned like fire in his shrivelled cheeks. He loosed his clinging hold and tried to shake ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... Unthought of—not, indeed, uncared for—but unthought of by the happy, the carriage rolls along, passing the hospital and the prison in its rapid progress; the golden youth, listlessly reclining in happy indolence, hears not the voice of pain, sees not the hectic glow of suffering on the cheek; nursed in the sweet sorrows of romance, dreams not of living agonies more fearful than those which the greatest actor can portray, and of death as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... new spirit begins to breathe in it. To the old teachings and legends are added new ones of a wholly different cast. The old epic spirit of grave and manly chivalry and godly wisdom is overshadowed by a new passion—adoration of tender babyhood and wanton childhood, amorous ecstasies, a hectic fire of erotic romance. ...
— Hindu Gods And Heroes - Studies in the History of the Religion of India • Lionel D. Barnett

... Parliament would infallibly in few months have wrecked and ended. By this path there was clearly no mounting. The far-darting, restlessly coruscating soul, equips beyond all others to shine in the Talking Era, and lead National Palavers with their spolia opima captive, is imprisoned in a fragile hectic body which quite forbids the adventure. "Es ist dafur gesorgt," says Goethe, "Provision has been made that the trees do not grow into the sky;"—means are always there to stop ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... Chair softly murmured again. "The last essay he wrote in me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it began, how it went on, and how it ended! 'In the very promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Timminses'. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... proved true. The days passed like bright smiles, in which, however, lurked the pensiveness of autumn. Slowly failing maples glowed first with the hectic flush of disease, but gradually warmer hues stole into the face of Nature, for it is the dying of the leaves that causes the changes ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... grow visible, as though in the intensity of its pure fire the mere earthly body which had contained it were being re-absorbed and consumed. Sometimes in the evenings her pulse quickened and her cheeks flushed with the hectic touch of fever; it was the only symptom of physical disorder I ever detected in her;—but even that was slight,—the temperature of her system was hardly affected by it. So she lay, her body fading, day after day and hour after hour. Madame Jeannel was deeply concerned, for she ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... face, still fatigued, had become quite calm, and looked up, as she sat, with a humble childlike expression at the thin blond face and slightly sunken grey eyes which now shone with hectic brightness. She might have been taken for an image of passionate strength beaten and worn with conflict; and he for an image of the self-renouncing faith which has soothed that conflict into rest. As he looked at the sweet submissive face, he remembered ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... thought, is not balanced, as though, for a moment or an hour, the control was gone from the brain. Or—and I think this was the feeling I had—that some other control was in charge. Not the Agnes Blakiston I knew, but another Agnes Blakiston, perhaps, was exerting a temporary dominance, a hectic, craven, and hateful control. ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... is not very unusual in ghost seers. The brother of a friend of my own, a man of letters and wide erudition, was, as a boy, employed in a shop in a town, say Wexington. The overseer was a dark, rather hectic-looking man, who died. Some months afterwards the boy was sent on an errand. He did his business, but, like a boy, returned by a longer and more interesting route. He stopped as a bookseller's shop to stare at the books and pictures, and while doing ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... don't excite yourself." Mrs. Whitney noticed with alarm the hectic flush that dyed Kathleen's white cheeks. "I will fill his place. Come to think of it, I did not like his manner this morning when he asked for his wages, and he ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... existence. Life to her was the cat-like attempt to get as much comfort as possible regardless of others. The only emotion Ishmael obtained out of Cloom came from Katie Jacka, and that was rather unhealthy, because furtive and sentimental, and he only detested it. As to his mother, that hectic, uneven creature, she was to him a loud-voiced person of tempers and tendernesses equally gusty, not a being as much "I" to herself as he was to himself. It was only on the day following the supper party that he began to be affected by her ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse



Words linked to "Hectic" :   agitated, feverish



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