Word: flirt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Author Machado has his hero flirt with suicide and murder before he turns him into a philosophical autobiographer. What keeps Dom Casmurro from being a routine triangle drama is the wit and wisdom with which Author Machado embroiders his plot. As in Epitaph of a Small Winner, he breaks into his story with joshing asides to the reader, e.g., "Perhaps I'll scratch this out when it goes to press," "Shake your head, reader. Make all the gestures of incredulity there are." His piece of advice hardest to follow: "Throw away this book...
...Holmes as a ladies' man: "At Haldane's on Sunday his sister said that she remembered you most perfectly in the 'nineties as the most perfect flirt in London. It was all, she said, in a way you had of cocking your eye that they found quite ravishing...
...improvident father clapped into debtors' prison. Young Charles did a five-month stretch of child labor in a shoe-polish factory in the Strand; years later, he could not walk past the site because it made him cry. In his early 20s, he was jilted by a flirt whom he had worshiped for four years. On the rebound, he married Catherine Hogarth,* a pouter pigeon of a woman who gave him ten children but small joy. This brood he later called "the largest family ever known with the smallest disposition to do anything for themselves...
...World." Tatiana was a shocking flirt herself, but stuck to her own class. At Moscow's fancy balls and masquerades, she waltzed away with many a nobleman's heart. Off ballroom floors, there were brief trysts in dim corridors. "He gave me his photo and I tucked it in my bodice, almost without looking at it, but as far as I could see I liked...
...flung themselves hopelessly against the moving horde. Others, already defeated, just watched the tide, making mental notes. But there was nothing to be done about it. Every morning, in every city in the U.S., the bosses watched glumly as the last stenographer disappeared down the hall with a departing flirt of her skirt, purse clutched firmly in one hand, cigarettes and matches in the other...