"Ormolu" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough, looking at the great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the mauve-draped mantel-shelf, exclaimed: "How horrid of Henry Wotton to be so late! I sent round to him this morning on chance, and he promised faithfully not ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, handtufted Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with pillar and claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments, upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... one from the Egyptian gallery, and another from the yellow drawing-room, each under a rich canopy, supported by gold columns. A beautiful chimney-piece of white statuary marble, and an immense mirror, with splendid draperies of blue, red, and yellow satin, rare china jars, and ornaments in ormolu, increase the dazzling brilliancy of the apartment. As this was my first appearance in the palace, the Countess, very considerately, proposed to Sir H——T——, who conducted us, that we should walk through ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... shoulders, and left the room, returning in a few minutes with a round cake of dynamite about the size of a penny, and a pretty little French clock, surmounted by an ormolu figure of Liberty trampling ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... shoulders exposed just as much as ever. She had mounted a tawdry cap, which Haggarty himself must have selected for her. She had all sorts of necklaces, bracelets, and earrings in gold, in garnets, in mother-of-pearl, in ormolu. She brought in a furious savour of musk, which drove the odours of onions and turf-smoke before it; and she waved across her wretched angular mean scarred features an old cambric handkerchief with a ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... windows, the gallery having three on the same side. You have the light streaming through eight consecutive openings; these openings, with their crimson curtains, doubled by the reflection, produce a most charming perspective. From the ceiling hangs a splendid ormolu chandelier, the floor is covered with a Persian carpet (brought I believe from Portugal), so sumptuous that one is afraid to walk on it, and a noble mosaic table of Florentine marble, bought in at an immense price ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... her gray eyes big with fear. She darted across the room to an ormolu table on which her handbag was lying. With astonishment, Desmond watched her unceremoniously spill out the contents on to the table and rake hastily amongst the collection of articles which a pretty girl carries round in ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... much affected in these parts and the walrus ivory which is Alaska's other contribution of material for the ornamental arts. Here we passed a veritable department store, its ground-floor plate-glass window set as a drawing-room, with gilded, brocaded chairs, marquetry table, and ormolu clock, and I know not what costliness of rug and curtain. It was all so strange that it seemed unreal after that long passage of the savage wilds, that long habitation of huts and igloos and tents. Hitherto we had often been fortunate could we buy a little flour ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... abruptly, and, advancing to the ormolu clock surmounted by a helmeted Minerva, which throned on the chimney-piece between two malachite vases, passed her lace handkerchief between the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... there was silence in the stuffy little room, and for some minutes after. Then he stepped to the mantelpiece for the match-box and candle. A small ormolu clock ticked there, and while he groped for the matches he put out a hand to stop the noise, which had suddenly grown intolerable. He desisted, remembering that he did not know how the clock worked—that Mrs. Wilcox, who wound it up religiously on Monday mornings, was proud of it, ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... hands of the handsome Louis XV. clock upon its ormolu bracket seemed to move along with maddening rapidity. Two hours more, and her fate and that of Armand would be sealed. In two hours she must make up her mind whether she will keep the knowledge so cunningly gained to herself, and leave her brother to his fate, or whether she will ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... him she had been reserving herself, he felt that so graceful an impulse needed no special explanation. She had the art of making it seem quite natural that they should move away together to the remotest of Mrs. Boykin's far-drawn salons, and that there, in a glaring privacy of brocade and ormolu, she should turn to him with a smile which avowed her intentional quest ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... European parties,—tea, ices, lemonade, and et ceteras,—and the other opened into a ball-room which is a sort of miniature of the 'salle blanche' of the Winter Palace, being white and gold, and very brilliantly lighted with 'ormolu' chandeliers filled with myriads of candles. This room (at least forty feet long by perhaps twenty-five) opened into a carpeted conservatory of about the same size, filled with orange-trees and japonica plants covered with fruit and flowers, arranged very gracefully ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... steel grate; while the third is painted blue and gold, and has a stove made on a new plan, for it is managed so that its own brightness shall help to throw out the heat of the fire in an equal and agreeable manner. The fourth and last mantelpiece is painted black, and ornamented with ormolu; it contains a polished steel stove. Three ormolu fenders, and five bright ones are placed together with the mantelpieces; and they certainly make a goodly show. But we must now leave them, and go on to see ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn't read it, though The Middle had been out three days and bloomed, I assured myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals which gave one of the ormolu tables the air of a stand at a station. The impression he made on me personally was such that I wished him to read it, and I corrected to this end with a surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless conspicuity of the sheet. ...
— The Figure in the Carpet • Henry James
... wall-chairs and the Sheraton settee and the Chippendale stands and the Axminster carpet and the bronze clock with Shakespeare and Ariosto reclining on it—yes, she even admired Shakespeare on the clock—and the ormolu cabinet and the bead-work foot-stools and the dreadful Sevres dish with a cherub in it and—but why enumerate. She admired everything! And Dr. Mitchell's heart expanded in his bosom till he felt it would ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... Fielding could not help noticing the plainness of its furniture and adornment. The chairs were covered with a cheap red cretonne; there was an armchair or two with the high seat and long elbows, which seemed to have gone astray from a Peckham drawing-room; an ormolu clock under a glass shade ornamented the overmantel, and in the way of literature there was one book in the room—Prescott's Conquest of Peru—and a copy of ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... his fancy was busy with the figures of a thousand things that might be—of a certain nameless somebody, mistress of that poor, sombre house, but so lighting it up with grace and gay sweetness that the hard sofa became the most luxurious lounge, and the cheap table more gorgeous than ormolu; and of a certain other nameless somebody coming home at evening—an opening door—a rustle in the hall as of women's robes—a singular sound as of meeting lips—then a coming together arm in arm into the dingy furnished ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis |
