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Ready-made   Listen
adjective
Ready-made  adj.  Made already, or beforehand, in anticipation of need; not made to order; as, ready-made clothing; ready-made jokes.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ready-made" Quotes from Famous Books



... ready-made clothes' shop, the owner of which had a large rural connection. As the crook had absorbed most of Gabriel's money, he attempted, and carried out, an exchange of his overcoat for a shepherd's ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... mixture of class egotism, paternal tenderness and twisted morality, Bachelder listened to the end, then said, "Of course, Mrs. Steiner approves of a ready-made family?" ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... I need hardly say, as a considerable surprise. The future was as rosy as the rosiest sunrise in any part of the world could be—a most desirable and charming wife, a life of contentment and pleasure. Who could ask for a better future? No more soldiering. On the contrary, a ready-made road to success, in whatever walk of life I chose to pursue. Some such thoughts—and many others—passed through my mind and I plucked up courage. Still, my heart was not in the affair, as you will see; but I argued to myself that, if the marriage did not finally ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... an awful collapse. A yawning gulf had been driven into the earth, and the hut—originally a solid structure—having been hurled bodily skyward, shattered to atoms, and inextricably mixed in its parts, had come down again into the gulf as into a ready-made grave. ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne

... matter was easily enough arranged. On his arrival from the other world, he had merely found it necessary to spend a quarter of an hour at a barber's, who had trimmed down the Puritan's full beard into a pair of grizzled whiskers, then, patronizing a ready-made clothing establishment, he had exchanged his velvet doublet and sable cloak, with the richly worked band under his chin, for a white collar and cravat, coat, vest, and pantaloons; and lastly, putting aside his steel-hilted broadsword to take up a gold-headed ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... is always Leonora to cheer you up; I don't want to sadden you. Her husband is quite an economical person of so normal a figure that he can get quite a large proportion of his clothes ready-made. That is the great desideratum of life, and that is the end of my story. The child is to be brought up as ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford

... You can be comfortable and clean if you have the energy; and it is better to scrub your own kitchen-floor, or raise a bushel of potatoes, than to sit and whine about luck or respectability. Now and then a ready-made fortune drops down upon one, and I don't know but it often brings a curse: anyhow, what you work for, you are pretty sure to enjoy.' It makes me mad when I see healthy, hearty young women sighing for servants and pianos and what not; when their grandmothers, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas

... I shook hands with a small, stoop-shouldered woman, in a new, ready-made dress, with abundant yellow hair drawn back from the thinnest, palest, saddest little face I had ever seen. She was holding an immaculately clean baby, asleep, its long golden lashes lying on cheeks as white and sunken as her own. A sturdily built boy of about six scrambled up from where ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... "Oh, people with these old, ready-made opinions usually go to church. But you can't evade me like that." She tapped the edge of his seat with the toe of her gold slipper. "You sat there all evening, glaring at me as if you could eat me alive. Now I give you a chance to state your objections, and you merely criticize my audience. What ...
— Youth and the Bright Medusa • Willa Cather

... had enough experience with her own tailor-made gowns to know that the material was the very best that money could buy. The apparent absence of any padding in the broad shoulders of the frock coat he wore, to her mind, more than compensated for the "ready-made" scarf, and if the white waistcoat was not fashionably cut, she knew that she had never been able to afford a pique skirt of just ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... these officious middle-men whom the world does not truly want; chiffonniers of trade, who only pick up a living out of the great press and waste and overflow; and our boys are so eager to slip in to some such easy, ready-made opportunity,—to get some ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... carry you to the bottom!" cried Kallolo; who then, turning round, shouted to his companions to bring the rope. They came hurrying to the spot with a ready-made noose, which they dexterously slipped over the monster's head, Tim at the same moment, springing on its back, leaped ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston

... Auld Spunkie says, "Ready-made answers are aye to seek." And I say, Betty, hae ye ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... subject-matter as something fixed and ready-made in itself, outside the child's experience; cease thinking of the child's experience as also something hard and fast; see it as something fluent, embryonic, vital; and we realize that the child and the curriculum are simply two limits which define a single process. Just as ...
— The Child and the Curriculum • John Dewey

... hat, the foreigner might have been, for apparel, a thrifty farmer on a trip to his market town. He wore a good ready-made suit, a soft white shirt with a soft collar, and a black tie, shot with red. But an observer would have seen that this was no care-lined farmer face; that, though the man himself was small, his feet were disproportionately ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... outnumber the former. They're cowards: the timid, the unsacrificing—the ones that want peace at any price—the ones who will trade freedom for security. Those were the ones who hid rather than risk their lives fighting the aggressor. Those were the ones who survived. Old Alexander had a ready-made slave cadre when he finished off the last of the warriors. For four centuries the survivors have been bred and selected to perpetuate slave traits. And the system works. The men don't want freedom—they ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... not altogether inconceivable to boot. And the alternative is, either a primordial state of homogeneous matter which contains the present cosmos in germ, and from which it is evolved without the aid of any environment—such a germ claiming a designer as much as any ready-made perfect world; or else, a primordial state of things like that which we should get at any cross-section of the secular process, in which every stage of life and death, growth and decay, evolution and involution, is represented as now. This would include fossils ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... hand as she spoke, and tried to keep it; but the hand was neutral, and she let it go. "It is a hand," she said to herself, in one of those quick reflections that so often visited her ready-made, "that turns the merely inquiring mind away. Nothing but ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... 'we must go to a cheap tailor's. I think that I have enough money to buy a ready-made suit ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little to the left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground and where the occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are not ready. Each well- regulated India Cemetery keeps half a dozen graves permanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills these are more usually baby's size, because children who come up weakened and ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... resolved to take action. Move? Certainly not! We had done our best in taking this apartment, and we modestly felt that our best was not to be sneezed at. We would make the other people move,—the impertinent people who had dared to produce children off the premises, and then to introduce them ready-made in a non-children apartment-house. Of course a landlord could not protect himself against the home-grown article, so to speak, but he could defend both himself and us against articles of foreign manufacture, and so flagrantly, as evidenced by the ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell

... them myself," I said, full of gratitude. And I went on at once to explain how it was done. It was simple enough: I bought the feathers and the hooks. They were not well made, but they were only for my own use. One could get ready-made flies in the shops, and they ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun

... wide-open overcoat) with great presence of mind chucked her under the chin, giving me the view at the same time of a flash of white teeth in his dark, lean face. The other man was very different; fair, with smooth, ruddy cheeks and burly shoulders. He was wearing a grey suit, obviously bought ready-made, for it seemed too tight ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... so happen that the prices are affixed to every article displayed, I make it a rule to read every one of them. I know therefore when Urling's lace is remarkably cheap, the value of most articles of millinery, the relative demands for boots, shoes, and hats, and prices of 'reach-me-downs' at a ready-made warehouse. At a pawn-broker's shop-window I have passed two or three hours very agreeably in ascertaining the sums at which every variety of second-hand goods are 'remarkably cheap,' from a large folio Bible as divinity, flutes and flageolets as music, pictures ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various

... is not an unmixed good, in my opinion," said Mrs. Carroll, stoutly. "They sell more cabbages and apples, but they buy cheap fabrics and ready-made clothing in place of the stout homespun that the women used ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton

... when I was young, I made Monsieur Beaurain's acquaintance one Sunday in this neighborhood. He was employed in a draper's shop, and I was a saleswoman in a ready-made clothing establishment. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I used to come and spend Sundays here occasionally with a friend of mine, Rose Leveque, with whom I lived in the Rue Pigalle, and Rose had a sweetheart, while I had none. He used to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... meetings, petitions, and remonstrances. Men were for or against the bill—every other political subject was left in abeyance. The measure once passed, and the Compromise repealed, the first natural impulse was to combine, organize, and agitate for its restoration. This was the ready-made, common ground ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... for our evvyday bread, and dere ain't nothin' lak corn bread and buttermilk to make healthy Niggers. Dere wouldn't be so many old sick Niggers now if dey et corn bread evvyday and let all dis wheat bread and sto'-bought, ready-made bread alone 'cept ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... that is, re-polished, by a species of oil distilled from the wig. In the days of its youth the waistcoat was not, of course, without freshness, but it was one of those waistcoats, bought for four francs, which come from the hooks of the ready-made clothing dealer. All these things were carefully brushed, and so was the shiny and misshapen hat. They harmonized with each other, even to the black gloves which covered the hands of this subaltern Mephistopheles, whose ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac

... 790 ounces of water in 870 of serum, which leaves 80. Of this, albumen furnishes seventy, and the ten others, with the exception of a small portion of fat which floats here and there ready-made, are salts. It would take too long to explain what salts are here, but there is one sort of salt you know perfectly well; viz., that which is put on the dinner-table in a salt-cellar. And it is the most important of all. More than half the ten ounces ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace

... Pheidias, and who, in regard to the Greek sculpture of the age of Pheidias, were like people criticising Michelangelo, without knowledge of the earlier Tuscan school—of the works of Donatello and Mino da Fiesole—easily satisfied themselves with theories of its importation ready-made from other countries. Critics in the last century, especially, noticing some characteristics which early Greek work has in common, indeed, with Egyptian art, but which are common also to all such early work everywhere, supposed, as a matter of course, that it came, as the Greek religion ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... enthusiasm, but a civil war, likely to fan to uncommon heat the animosities of party even in the localities controlled by the government; that this war would have to be carried on not by means of a ready-made machinery, ruled by an undisputed, absolute will, but by means to be furnished by the voluntary action of the people:—armies to be formed by voluntary enlistments; large sums of money to be raised by the people, through representatives, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... to listen to the tale of crime. It appeared that Reynolds, my wife's maid, in putting Liosha into a ready-made gown—a model gown I believe is the correct term—insisted on her being properly corseted. Liosha, agonisingly constricted, rebelled. The maid was obdurate. Liosha flew at her with a pair of scissors. I think I should have done the same. Reynolds ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... prodigalities. Du Ronceret had profited by Couture's follies for the pretty Madame Cadine, for whom, during his ephemeral opulence, he had arranged a delightful ground-floor apartment with a garden in the rue Blanche. The Norman, who wanted his luxury ready-made, bought Couture's furniture and all the improvements he was forced to leave behind him,—a kiosk in the garden, where he smoked, a gallery in rustic wood, with India mattings and adorned with potteries, through which to reach the kiosk if it rained. ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... author of "Sandford and Merton," and creator of the immortal Mr. Barlow, Robert Maitland had conceived the hope that he might have a girl educated up to his own intellectual standard, and made, or "ready-made," a helpmate meet for him. He was, in a more or less formal way, the guardian of Margaret Shields, and the ward might be expected (by anyone who did not know human nature any better) to blossom into ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang

... of being prosy, I will mention the a priori grounds upon which we may argue that the civilization of Central America did not grow up there, but was brought ready-made by a people who emigrated there from some other country. There is a theory afloat, that it is only in temperate climates that barbarous nations make much progress in civilizing themselves. In tropical ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... in good ones. The only question necessary to be asked previous to the formation of such a club would be,—may it not be feared that the motive to resist dishonesty would be lessened by the existence of the club, or that ready-made rogues, by belonging to it, might find the means of obtaining situations which they would otherwise have been kept out of by the impossibility of obtaining security among those who know them? Suppose this ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... my guide; Silver Fizz, whose real name was unknown, and who bore the title of his favourite drink; and huge Hank Milligan—all ears and kind intention; and there was Rushton, pouring out his ready-made tale, with ever-shifting eyes, turning from face to face, seeking confirmation of details none had witnessed ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... condolence, and found them living in the direst poverty and disorder. Nor is that surprising, seeing that the family lives in a single room, with only a screen to divide it for decency's sake. Already the coffin was standing in their midst—a plain but decent shell which had been bought ready-made. The child, they told me, had been a boy of nine, and full of promise. What a pitiful spectacle! Though not weeping, the mother, poor woman, looked broken with grief. After all, to have one burden the less on their shoulders ...
— Poor Folk • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... rest because the thing got on my mettle. I knew that I was right, and that they were simply stealing the public domain. Then, as I hung on, it became apparent that there was a man's work cut out for somebody up here. I've taken the ready-made job." ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden

... half about—for two breaths at least she had a snobbish impulse to overlook Billy and hurry away. Billy was tall, with a face like a young Greek god—but how greet him there with the Hammond girl to see, in a checked suit, patently ready-made, with the noisiest of shirts, a flowing bright red tie, and a sunburned straw hat? If it were only Adair, she would not mind—Hilary was, she knew, very much more critical. She might have run away, but that she caught ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... cheap, ready-made blouse, with absurd little bows tacked on down the front, which Ethel longed to abolish with one sweep, and her skirt, which had shrunk considerably in front, sagged in a ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... a small and shapely foot, he found boots ready-made without any difficulty. He was promised, too, that all the linen he required should be sent home in the evening. But when he came to explain to the hatter what sort of an apparatus he intended to plant on his head, he encountered great difficulties. His ideal was an ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About

... Hole was not preserved; it is gone, long, long ago. It is strange. Just as it stood, it was itself a monument; a ready-made one. It was finished, it was complete, its materials were strong and lasting, it needed no furbishing up, no repairs; it merely needed to be let alone. It was the first brick, the Foundation Stone, upon which was reared a mighty Empire—the Indian Empire of Great Britain. It ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... more humps of soggy Belgium into more and more sandbags. I don't want to make myself unpleasant to the War Office, but I really can't see why we haven't once and for all built trenches all done up in eight-inch thick steel plates. They could easily be brought up ready-made, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various

... built the castle with a thousand windows for Aladdin, in a single night, would only be clever enough to lend us his assistance." But upon second thought, he concluded that there would be "no fun" in having our house ready-made for us, and magnanimously declared that if he had the wonderful lamp in his hands that minute, with full power to summon up the obedient genius, and set him to work, he ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer

... does not appear to us as it really is, but with all its accompaniment of historic memories. The special characteristic of prestige is to prevent us seeing things as they are and to entirely paralyse our judgment. Crowds always, and individuals as a rule, stand in need of ready-made opinions on all subjects. The popularity of these opinions is independent of the measure of truth or error they contain, and is solely regulated by ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... slumber! By and by comes along the State, God's vicar. Does she say,—"My poor, forlorn foster-child! Behold here a force which I will make dig and plant and build for me"? Not so, but,—"Here is a recruit ready-made to my hand, a piece of destroying energy lying unprofitably idle." So she claps an ugly grey suit on him, puts a musket in his grasp, and sends him off, with Gubernatorial and other godspeeds, to do duty ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... with rather a deep voice. He wore a spotless turn-down collar, his hair was carefully brushed, and he evidently had on his "company manners," which seemed to fit him rather badly, like ready-made clothes. He spoke to Brian in quite a deferential manner, calling him Seaton, and he was evidently shy of Elsie ...
— Under Padlock and Seal • Charles Harold Avery

... Knowles. You have a confession of faith ready-made for everybody, but yourself. I only meant for you to take care what you do. That woman looks as the Prodigal Son might have done when he began to be in want, and would fain have fed himself with the husks ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... affiliations which men have. They have no political past, no political promises to keep, no political sins to expiate. They start fair and with a clean sheet. Those who make the mistake of falling into old party lines, and of accepting ready-made opinions and prejudices, will make no difference in the political life of the country except to enlarge the voters' list and increase the ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... Claire didn't make him so nervous that he thought of his clothes, but the maid did. He was certain that she knew that he had blacked his own shoes, knew how old were his clothes. He was urging himself, "Must get new suit tomorrow—ready-made—mustn't forget, now—be sure—get suit tomorrow." He wanted to apologize to the maid for existing.... He wouldn't dare to fall in love with the maid.... And he'd kill the man who said he could be fool enough to fall ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... what seemed extreme and subversive in the old world, was compatible with good and wise government, with respect for social order, and the preservation of national character and custom. The ideas which captured and convulsed the French people were mostly ready-made for them, and much that is familiar to you now, much of that which I have put before you from other than French sources, will meet us again next week with the old faces, when we ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... Franklin intermingled sense with folly, correct living with dissipation, in a manner that must have made it difficult for an observer to forecast the final outcome, and which makes it almost equally impossible now to form a satisfactory idea of him. He is not to be disposed of by placing him in any ready-made and familiar class. If he had turned out a bad man, there would have been abundance in his early life to point the moralist's warning tale; as he turned out a very reputable one, there is scarcely less abundance for panegyrists ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... plainly dressed. His clothing was of the cheap, ready-made variety, worn nearly to shabbiness and matched by a gray flannel shirt with a flowing black tie, knotted at the throat, and a soft gray hat that was a bit weatherstained. His shoes were shabby and unshined. His whole appearance was out of keeping with ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum

... half conscious when they write, a fact which accounts for their want of intellect and the tediousness of their writings; they do not really themselves understand the meaning of their own words, because they take ready-made words and learn them. Hence they combine whole phrases more than words—phrases banales. This accounts for that obviously characteristic want of clearly defined thought; in fact, they lack the die that stamps their thoughts, ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... unfortunate mood for a woman who had not been married six weeks. From her parents she concealed everything. They had been amongst the few acquaintances of Heddegan who knew nothing of his secret, and were indignant enough when they saw such a ready-made household foisted upon their only child. But she would not support them ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy

... gilded, marbled, sprinkled, or otherwise decorated. The head band—for which many French binders substitute a fold in the leather—is now added. It was formerly twisted as the book was sewn, but at present is too often bought ready-made and simply glued on. The book is ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... also to skirts and dresses, the production of which is a branch of our trade. It was the Russian Jew who had introduced the factory-made gown, constantly perfecting it and reducing the cost of its production. The ready-made silk dress which the American woman of small means now buys for a few dollars is of the very latest style and as tasteful in its lines, color scheme, and trimming as a high-class designer can make it. A ten-dollar gown is ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan

... pay. So the manufacturer weaves bad silk, and makes shoddy cloth, and the wine-merchant doctors his wine, and the brewer his ale, and the milkman puts water into his milk, and the butterman sells butter made of Thames mud, and the calico is dressed with chalk, and the ready-made clothes come to pieces because the thread's ends are not fastened, and the farm work is half done, and the whole trade and commerce of the country is one great system of ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould

... the family procession, I found myself on my entry into the world already equipped with seven sisters and four surviving brothers. I was also in the unusual position of being born an uncle, finding myself furnished with four ready-made nephews—the present Lord Durham, his two brothers, Mr. Frederick Lambton and Admiral-of-the-Fleet Sir Hedworth Meux, and ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton

... Young Prince went to work he put on his royal garment—a ten-dollar ready-made costume that cost him two weeks' hard work. But it was worth the effort. His freckled face and his tawny shock of red hair rose above the gorgeous plaid of the clothes like a prairie sunset, and as he pranced off ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... statement that it would be four guineas. I cut short a rambling discourse, in which the tailor sought to saddle various remote agencies with the responsibility for the increase, and stamped out of the establishment with the blasphemous vow that I'd get a pair ready-made at the Stores. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... it otherwise just as I extracted it from its burrow. I must also be careful of its legs and mandibles, the least touch of which would rip open the nurseling. With a few turns of the finest wire I fix it to a little slab of cork, with its belly in the air. Next, to provide the grub with a ready-made hole, knowing that it will refuse to make one for itself, I contrive a slight incision in the skin, at the point where the Scolia lays her egg. I now place the grub upon the larva, with its head touching the bleeding wound, and ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... said Kosmaroff, who himself happened to be standing. He was leaning against the high, old-fashioned mantel-piece, which had seen better days—and company—and smoking a cigarette. He was clad in a cheap, ready-made suit; for his heart was in his business, and he scraped and saved every kopeck. But the cheap clothing could not hide that ease of movement which bespeaks a long descent, or conceal the slim strength of limb ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... to make you understand. Yes, I did meet, if not altogether good people, yet—The last people with whom I lived were a pretty good sort. They didn't accept life ready-made, but tried to make it over to suit ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev

... in particular trades; these are readily accessible to all. Unfortunately the facts do not allow any exaggeration; they are saddening and horrible enough in themselves. The life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; is washed and ironed into our linen; wrought into the laces and embroideries, the feathers and flowers, the sham furs with which we other women bedeck ourselves; it is poured into our adulterated foods; it is pasted on our matches ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... at his office at eight-fifty the following morning. At eight-fifty-two Mr. Terence Reardon, plainly uncomfortable in a ready-made blue-serge Sunday suit purchased on the Embarcadero for twenty-five dollars, came into the office. He was wearing a celluloid collar, and a quite noticeable rattle as he shook hands with Cappy Ricks betrayed the fact that he also ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... is indubitable that the bean is of earlier date than the pea. Its exceptional size and its agreeable flavor would certainly have attracted the attention of man from the remotest periods. The bean is a ready-made mouthful, and would be of the greatest value to the hungry tribe. Primitive man would at an early date have sown it beside his wattled hut. Coming from Central Asia by long stages, their wagons drawn by shaggy oxen and rolling on the circular ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... observance,'—the sight of these phrases in the splendour of their dramatic context in Macbeth and Hamlet casts shame upon their daily degraded employments. But the man of affairs has neither the time to fashion his speech, nor the knowledge to choose his words, so he borrows his sentences ready-made, and applies them in rough haste to purposes that they do not exactly fit. Such a man inevitably repeats, like the cuckoo, monotonous catchwords, and lays his eggs of thought in the material that has been woven into consistency by others. It ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh

... Connor, he felt as if that bright-eyed girl belonged to him, and now that he had a watch towards it, he seemed almost a ready-made Conductor. ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.

... all his clothes ready-made, probably at Jumble Sales, and he always seems to choose clothes made for a stouter bird. There is no reason why he should never look chic; he has a slimmer figure than the bullfinch, for instance, who always manages to look so well-tailored. ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson

... you do everybody must. But I'm so glad I'm clothed and in my right mind again. I couldn't have borne to meet my mother with that boys suit on. Do you think I look nice in this? I had to take what I could find ready-made, you know." ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine

... "Ready-made clothing!" It sounds so simple—just like that. Mrs. Fine Lady saunters into a shop, puts up her lorgnette, and lisps, "I'd like to see something in a satin afternoon dress." A plump blonde in tight-fitting black with a marcel wave trips over to mirrored ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... usually discovers on returning to his native land that they are not adapted to withstand the trying climatic conditions and the critical comments of press and public in this country. What was contemplated as a triumphal reentrance becomes a footrace to the nearest ready-made ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... the modern cottage with its glaring brick walls, slate roof, ungainly stunted chimney, and note the difference. Usually these modern cottages are built in a row, each one exactly like its fellow, with door and window frames exactly alike, brought over ready-made from Norway or Sweden. The walls are thin, and the winds of winter blow through them piteously, and if a man and his wife should unfortunately "have words" (the pleasing country euphemism for a violent ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield

... 'Nature has not provided ready-made all the things necessary for the life and happiness of mankind. In order to obtain these things we have to Work. The only rational labour is that which is directed to the creation of those things. Any kind of work which does not help us ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... Violet, excusing herself, goes over to the cottage. Floyd is not at home to be consulted, and she does not wish to blunder or to annoy him. She wins Marcia's favor to a certain extent, but her favor is the most unreliable gift of the gods. She has no mind of her own, but is continually picking up ready-made characteristics of her neighbors and trying them on as one would a bonnet, and with about the same success. While the rest of her small world is painfully aware of her inconsistency, she prides herself upon a wide range of mental ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... found a man who kept an assortment of really excellent ready-made clothing, and after chatting with the fellow until he had reduced his prices one half, we ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes

... learned in stuffs. I remarked it when she got into the coach, possibly because I was struck by its simplicity and conventional make. There was no trimming on the bottom, only stitching. Her sister's was just like it. They had the look of being ready-made." ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... "republique cosaque." [2 Cossack republic.] No Circe distorted with wicked charms the work of art of the bourgeois republic into a monstrosity. That republic lost nothing but the appearance of decency. The France of to-day was ready-made within the womb of the Parliamentary republic. All that was wanted was a bayonet thrust, in order that the bubble burst, and the ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx

... to the New Testament we find, as we might expect, a much clearer testimony to the reality of the conscience. The word came into the hands of the New Testament writers ready-made, but they gave to it a richer meaning, so that it is to them we must go if we would understand the nature and the supremacy of the conscience. The term occurs thirty-one times in the New Testament, but it does not appear once in the Gospels. ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander

... of character is to be found in the young man who consistently refuses good offers or even small chances of work because they are not good enough for him. He expects that Luck will suddenly bestow on him a ready-made position or a gorgeous chance suitable to the high opinions he holds of his own capacities. After a time people tire of giving him any openings at all. In wooing the Goddess of Luck he has neglected the Goddess ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook

... consul was in a different category. England, weary of the name of Samoa, and desirous only to see peace established, was prepared to wink hard during the process and to welcome the result of any German settlement. It was an unpardonable fault in Becker to have kicked and buffeted his ready-made allies into a state of jealousy, anger, and suspicion. Knappe set himself at once to efface these impressions, and the English officials rejoiced for the moment in the change. Between Knappe and de Coetlogon there seems to have been mutual sympathy; and, in considering the steps ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... long-lost nephew has been found, and you can proceed to lie right down in your ready-made bed of roses. There won't be any thorns. Bit of a step ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson

... faces, keen eyes, hooked noses. All were ready to split with laughing when they espied me, and I put my hands to my sides and split with laughter when I espied them, for fools and madmen tickle one another; they seek and attract one another. If when I got among them, I had not found ready-made the proverb about the money of fools being the patrimony of people with wits, they would have been indebted to me for it. I felt that nature had put my lawful inheritance into the purses of the pagods, and I devised a thousand ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... into hideous, worm-infested graves! The human mind does not want its undemonstrable beliefs challenged. It does not want the light of unbiased investigation thrown upon the views which it has accepted ready-made from doctor and theologian. Again, why? Because, my friends, the human mind is inert, despite its seemingly tremendous material activity. And its inertia is the result of its own self-mesmerism, its own servile ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... 1871, are not strictly germane to this chapter, because, in fact, the Bakouninists played no part in it. In the case of Lyons, the revolution maker was at work; in the case of Paris, "The working class," says Marx, "did not expect miracles from the Commune. They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending, by its own economic agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... had done the same. I should have been far wiser, I know now, if I had bought one of those ready-made, self-acting, fool- proof medicine chests such as are favoured by fourth-rate ship- masters. In such a chest each bottle has a number. On the inside of the lid is placed a simple table of directions: No. 1, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... in a letter to a friend, of the 9th of June, says—"The papers will have informed you how Mr. William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham has distinguished himself: he comes out as his father did, a ready-made orator, and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other, see him the first man in the country." Life, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... believed that he was the Messiah. According to their preconceived notions, the life of the Messiah, and the period in which he lived, were to be illustrated by signs and wonders. Messianic legends existed ready-made, in the hopes and expectations of the people, only needing to be transferred to the person and character of Jesus. The appearance of this work produced a great sensation in Germany. It was believed by many that the book should be prohibited; and the Prussian government ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... all these points, we make for you a special Cluthe Truss— one exactly adapted to your individual case— every part of it exactly what your condition requires. (Compare that with the way drug stores and local truss dealers try to fit you with a ready-made "stock" truss.) ...
— Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured • Chas. Cluthe & Sons

... as in religion, he made the past a law for the present, and resisted doctrines which are ready-made, and are not derived from experience. Consequently, he undervalued work which would never have been done from disinterested motives; and there were three of his most eminent contemporaries whom he decidedly underestimated. Having known Thiers, and heard him speak, he felt profoundly the talent ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... is—without presuming ourselves to attempt anything like a worthy portraiture of Francis Chantrey—that here, ready-made to the hand of any man competent to the task of illustrating a life full of instruction for the rising brotherhood of art, is a subject which it behooved the Royal institution that has so largely profited by Chantrey's ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... of an extra room in a Japanese house is only a matter of shifting a paper screen or so into a ready-made groove. It took me some time to decide whether I should screen off Jane in the corner that commanded a full view of the wonderful sea, or at the end where by sliding open the paper doors she could step at once into the ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... three, who need some differentiating upon paper, though their little spirits are as different in reality as spirits could be—all beautiful and all quite different. The eldest is a boy of eight whom we shall call "Laddie." If ever there was a little cavalier sent down ready-made it is he. His soul is the most gallant, unselfish, innocent thing that ever God sent out to get an extra polish upon earth. It dwells in a tall, slight, well-formed body, graceful and agile, with a head and face as clean-cut as if an old Greek cameo had come ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle

... seven on the next morning Jimmy stood in the warden's outer office. He had on a suit of the villainously fitting, ready-made clothes and a pair of the stiff, squeaky shoes that the state furnishes ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... with simply enough. There is just so much cloth to be had and just so many young and two-legged persons to be covered with it—and that is the end of it. The growing child walks down the years—turns every corner of life—with Vistas of Ready-Made Clothing hanging before him, closing behind him. Unless he shall fit himself to these clothes—he is given to understand—down the pitying, staring world he shall go, naked, all his days, like a dream ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... waters of the Ohio had subsided and the people were returning to the old spots of earth that once had been their home, but there was neither house to live in nor tool to work the land with. We reloaded with pine lumber, ready-made doors, windows, household utensils, stores and groceries, farming utensils, and with a good force of carpenters proceeded up the Ohio once more. The sight of the disconsolate, half-clad farmer waiting on the bank told us where his home had ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton

... travel for. "Why, we travel to have a good time," says that incorrigible Pauline Ingham, who will talk none but the Yankee language. Dear Pauline, if you go about the world expecting to find that same "good time" of yours ready-made, inspected, branded, stamped, jobbed by the jobbers, retailed by the retailers, and ready for you to buy with your spending-money, you will be sadly mistaken, though you have for spending-money all that united health, high spirits, good-nature, and kind heart of yours, and all papa's lessons of ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale

... think you've got a ready-made family," said the Kid, "come over to Butte any time and I'll win a bet from you. But I can tell you about that later. What I want to know is this: I met a couple of hustlers here to-day—boys I used to team with—and ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan

... acres to keep the world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs, harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars, ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts; unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides (under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that should ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... next day the young wife, her eyes swollen with weeping, was knitting socks for her husband. He told her he could buy them cheaper ready-made. She burst into tears. What was she to do? The maid did all the work of the house, there was not enough work in the kitchen for two. She always dusted the rooms. Did he want her ...
— Married • August Strindberg

... arbitration is not to be a ready-made affair, coming in on the crest of some wave of popular enthusiasm as was expected by ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... he should conquer his world as he has conquered life, to the end that he may elevate himself and not to the end that he may acquire external splendor and comfort. When tempted, however, he cannot resist. He ends by possessing the objects, the pretty, ready-made things; his soul makes no progress; he loses sight of the goal. Behold the child clumsy, unsteady, inept, enslaved! Those incapable muscles encase a captive soul. He is oppressed far more by this fatal ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... prince who was opposing God and Heaven. The soil was manured by treason, and the sowers made haste to use their opportunity. Thus especially was there danger in those wandering encampments of "outlandish people," whose habits rendered them the ready-made missionaries of sedition; whose swarthy features might hide a Spanish heart, and who in telling fortunes might readily dictate policy.[306] Under the disguise of gipsies, the emissaries of the emperor ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... the apparent exceptions and anomalies which from time to time are observed. We have done with the lusus naturae of earlier generations. We pay little attention to the stories of 'miracles,' except so far as we receive them ready-made at the hands of the churches which still hold to them. Not the less do we meet with strange and surprising facts, which a century or two ago would have been handled by the clergy and the courts, but ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... are more plastic, more adaptable, and at the same time less sure; and this is notably true of man. It would be a mistake to suppose that man has few instinctive tendencies; perhaps he has more than any other creature. But his instinctive behavior has not the hard-and-fast, ready-made character that we see in the insects. Man is by all odds the most pottering, hem-and-hawing of animals. Instinct does not lead him straight to his goal, but makes him seek this way and that till he finds it. His powers of observation, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth

... A ready-made nest, a family heirloom which needs but a little restoring, is a precious thing for the Mason, ever sparing of her time. We find so many of the old homes repaired and restocked that I suspect the Bee of laying new foundations only when there are no secondhand ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... demand for ready-made clothing has opened a new field for girls obliged to enter the business world as soon as the law will permit them to leave school. This requires hand finishing on fancy waists and plain and fancy gowns, which are made by the dozens on machines run by ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman

... canon; but, like him, he was never a willing schismatic, and his singing robes were the full and flowing canonicals of the church by law established. Inspiration makes short work with the usage of the best authors and ready-made elegances of diction; but where Wordsworth is not possessed by his demon, as Moliere said of Corneille, he equals Thomson in verbiage, out-Miltons Milton in artifice of style, and Latinizes his diction beyond ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... subjected to inspection independently of the setting in which the subject of our study is found. Who, by an examination of the brain of a bee or of an ant, could foresee the intricate organized industry of the hive or the anthill? The seven ages of man are not stored ready-made in the little body of the infant. At any rate, they are beyond the reach of the most penetrating vision. In the case of the simple mechanisms which can be constructed by man a forecast of future function is ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... some of the articles that shot forth into the broad light of day. Among the rest there was a bran fired new set of ready-made teeth, to be used in case of accident. Up to that moment I didn't know that Mr. Hallelujah used the common tooth of commerce. These teeth slipped out of the valise with a Sabbath smile and vulcanized ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... hand. The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship and schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would long have been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art. To struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson

... water and sewage conduit—in use! It ran from the prison building, right down across the yard, six feet under ground, and out under the north wall, under the street outside, and finally into the river. Built of brick, four feet wide, four feet high. A ready-made ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... physiology of American Puritanism, and its effects upon the national literature, one quickly discerns two main streams of influence. On the one hand, there is the influence of the original Puritans—whether of New England or of the South—, who came to the New World with a ready-made philosophy of the utmost clarity, positiveness and inclusiveness of scope, and who attained to such a position of political and intellectual leadership that they were able to force it almost unchanged upon ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... the house was duller in her absence, he was but dimly conscious of the difference. He was still fighting a battle in which a susceptible heart and a reasonable mind had locked horns in a well-nigh hopeless conflict. Reason, common-sense, the instinctive ready-made judgments of his training and environment,—the deep-seated prejudices of race and caste,—commanded him to dismiss Rena from his thoughts. His stubborn heart ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt

... sack-cloth. With this the shirt is made, simply by cutting two holes in the sides to admit the arms, and the body being passed into it, it is worn in time of rain. Hence the saying of the old missionaries, that in the "forests of America garments were found ready-made ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... the visitor, looking down at the rather ugly print. "It's a gingham. Bought it ready-made in Elberon. Do you ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe

... man should fear and tremble, should hesitate to reach out after, to labor to know, all that his intellect and energy can compass. As though to be good he must accept situations, sentiments, ideas ready-made, and dwarf his intellect and bind his mental ability by the ...
— Men, Women, and Gods - And Other Lectures • Helen H. Gardener

... horizontally outward from the trunk. Over each a tazo is flung, one end left loose, the other remaining in the hand of him who pitched it. Before flinging them the rope has been passed through the iron ring with which all lariats are provided, thus furnishing a ready-made running noose. ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the "Palace of Crystal" will be built. Then ... In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky

... is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter. But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde

... which might follow the rupture. Upon reading this document; Don John fell into a blazing passion. He vehemently denounced the deputies as traitors. He swore that men who came to him thus prepared with ready-made protests in their pockets, were rebels from the commencement, and had never intended any agreement with him. His language and gestures expressed unbounded fury. He was weary of their ways, he said. They had better look to themselves, for the King would never leave their rebellion unpunished. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... ready-made suit of blue cloth, not unlike that worn by the district telegraph boys of to-day, which he judged would look more suitable than his ordinary attire for the character he was about to assume of ...
— Making His Way - Frank Courtney's Struggle Upward • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... religious man, these attempted elucidations of his teachings will abundantly show. His religion, however, is very far remote from what is called religion in this day. He has no patience with second-hand beliefs,—with articles of faith ready-made for the having. Whatsoever is accepted by men because it is the tradition of their fathers, and not a deep conviction arrived at by legitimate search, is to him of no avail; and all merely historical and intellectual faith, standing outside the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... grew—how without anxiety or care the flower woke into loveliness, how without weaving these leaves were woven, how without toiling these complex tissues spun themselves, and how without any effort or friction the whole slowly came ready-made from the loom of God in its more than Solomon-like glory. "So," He says, making the application beyond dispute, "you care-worn, anxious men must grow. You, too, need take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink or what ye shall put on. For if God so clothe the grass ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... more Indians in Idaho, Oregon, or Arizona. The battles of the others being done, they went East in better coffins to sleep where their mothers or their comrades wanted them. Though wind and rain wrought changes upon the hill, the ready-made graves and boxes which these soldiers left behind proved heirlooms as serviceable in their way as were the tenements that the living had bequeathed to Drybone. Into these empty barracks came to dwell and do business every joy that made the cow-puncher's ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister

... peanut. Our goal was a village situated beneath lofty chalk hills, dazzling white in the sun. A large portion of the village, which had been burned a short time before, was already nearly rebuilt, thanks to the ready-made houses supplied by ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... happened a ring at his door. He did not precipitate himself upon the door. With beating heart he retained his presence of mind, and said to himself that of course it could not possibly be a client. Even dentists who bought a practice ready-made never had a client on their first day. He heard the attendant answer the ring, and then he heard the attendant saying, ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett

... and an impromptu indignation meeting. Stanning had gone to work scientifically. From the moment that, ducking under the guard of a sturdy town youth, he had caught sight of Sheen retreating from the fray, he had grasped the fact that here, ready-made, was his chance of working off his grudge against him. All he had to do was to spread the news abroad, and the school would do the rest. On his return from the town he had mentioned the facts of the case to one or two of the more ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse

... York! We must get some things ready-made. Oh, Felix, how will it be if he does not forgive her?' He attempted to laugh. 'When I spoke of such a thing as possible he had not sworn then that he would never give ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of men as their strictly private property,—not even to the clergy, or the newspapers commonly called "religious." Now, although it would be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must have ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... until they catch a reflection from a separate moral world. If he tries to write with two distinct purposes, hoping to "suffice the eye and save the soul beside," [Footnote: The Ring and the Book.] as Browning puts it, he is apt to hide the intrinsic spirituality of things under a cloak of ready-made moral conceptions. In his moments of deepest insight the poet is sure that his one duty is to reveal beauty clearly, without troubling himself about moralizing, and ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... little wind that night, they remained at anchor, and in the morning were surprised with the return of Trumpet, bringing another boat equally well stored with provisions, with chests of piece-goods and ready-made clothes, and along with him the fiscal of the place. At noon they espied a sail towards the south, and immediately gave chase, but she outsailed them, and sheltered under the fort of Cochin. Informed that they would not be molested in ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms

... to be found in a book.... There is at present in the press a new preface to an old novel of mine called "The Irrational Knot." In that preface I define the first order in Literature as consisting of those works in which the author, instead of accepting the current morality and religion ready-made without any question as to their validity, writes from an original moral standpoint of his own, thereby making his book an original contribution to morals, religion, and sociology, as well as to belles letters. I place Shakespeare with Dickens, Scott, Dumas pere, etc., in the second order, because, ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy

... later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues', making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so often the night of his ball, "His wife, very unwell—most grieved not to have been able to come—" She did not give him time to finish, rose slowly, unwound herself like a long and slender snake from the pleated folds of her tight dress, and said, without looking ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... horrible in the eyes of Mr. Palford, who accepted no cut but that of a West End tailor. They were badly made things enough, because they were unconsidered garments that Tembarom had barely found time to snatch from a "ready-made" counter at the last moment. He had been too much "rushed" by other things to remember that he must have them until almost too late to get them at all. He bought them merely because they were clothes, and warm enough ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... to follow their example, who knows,—clean and honest though I have been. I do not propose to make a fool of myself by remaining quiet when others attempt to play games on me, with all their excuses ready-made. They are men and so am I—students or kiddies or whatever they may be. They are bigger than I, and unless I get even with them by punishment, I would cut a sorry figure. But in the attempt to get even, if I resort to ordinary means, they are sure to make it a boomerang. If I tell them, "You're wrong," ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri

... my mother also worked at the art of net-making. At times she was employed in making up clothing for what some years ago were popularly called the slop-shops, mostly situated in the lower section of the city. These were shops which kept supplies of ready-made clothing for sailors and other transient people who harbored along the wharves. It was coarse work, and was made up as cheaply as possible. At that time the shipping of the port was much of it congregated in the lower part of the city, not far from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... is difficult to obtain this ready-made of good quality, and we could not find any proper and circumstantial directions for making it, which, on trial, answered the purpose, and it is really a great acquisition to the army and navy, to travellers, invalids, &c. the editor has bestowed some time, ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... for tea. When I had money enough, I used to get half-a-pint of ready-made coffee and a slice of bread and butter. When I had none, I used to look at a venison shop in Fleet Street; or I have strolled, at such a time, as far as Covent Garden Market, and stared at the pineapples. I was fond of wandering about the Adelphi, because it was a mysterious place, with those ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... the cold air from coming in; and also porous enough to let the perspiration out. Your feet are not exactly like those of any one else; and yet you expect to find at any shoe store a comfortable shoe ready-made. You expect that shoe to come close to your foot, and yet allow you to move it with perfect freedom. You expect all these good qualities, and what is more remarkable, it does not seem difficult for most people to get them. There is an old saying, "To him who wears shoes, the ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan

... born complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without intelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed with a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience: and as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final and only ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... is obvious enough. The fellow's behaviour is detestable; he looks at you from head to foot as if you were applying for a place in his stable. Whenever I want an example of a contemptible aristocrat, there's Eldon ready-made. Contemptible, because he's such a sham; as if everybody didn't know his history ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... destinies of the Great Republic. His other hand is in your boot, which he is about to polish. It is impossible to turn a fellow citizen whose vote may make his master—say, rather, employer—Governor or President, or who may be one or both himself, into a flunky. That article must be imported ready-made from other centres of civilization. When a New Englander has lost his self-respect as a citizen and as a man, he is demoralized, and cannot be trusted with the money to pay ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... de big shingles fru de water up to dar knees. No swamps am dar; no shingles am dar; dey doan't need 'em, 'case dar de hous'n haint builded wid hands, for dey'm all builded by de Lord, and gib'n to de good niggers, ready-made, and for nuffin'. De Lord don't say, like as ded massa say, 'Pomp, dar's de logs and de shingles' (dey'm allers pore shingles, de kine dat woant sell; but massa say, 'dey'm good 'nuff for niggers,' ef de roof do leak). De Lord doan't say: 'Now, Pomp, you go to work and build ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... satchel from between the mattresses, and opened it to gloat over her treasures; for she quite considered them as her own. Again she was "tempted of the devil." She thought of the fine shops in London, and the fine ready-made dresses she could buy with the very smallest of ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... they never expected to find there—heaps of grain, sacks of flour, barrels of wine, casks of brandy, quantities of chestnuts and potatoes; and besides all this, chests containing ointments, drugs and lint, and lastly a complete arsenal of muskets, swords, and bayonets, a quantity of powder ready-made, and sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal-in short, everything necessary for the manufacture of more, down to small mills to be turned by hand. Lalande kept his word: the life of an old woman was not too much to give in ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... and matter appears to me to assume a very different meaning if, instead of repeating ready-made formulas and wasting time on the game of setting concept against concept, we take the trouble to return to the study of nature, and begin by drawing up an inventory of the respective phenomena of mind and matter, examining with each of these phenomena the characteristics in which the ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... these products of foreign industry, the observer may see exposed for sale in the shops coarse cotton goods and hardware of an inferior quality, both manufactured in England; boots and shoes, the former of which are worn chiefly, of Buenos Ayres make; and ready-made garments of linen and poor cloths. The imported liquors and articles of food are principally a small quantity of sugar, lard, wine of an execrable quality, and Hamburg gin, together with a few boxes of candles and some oil and soap. To this list of imports ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... visit was to a department store, where he got the linen and other articles he would need during his seclusion,—sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, pajamas, articles of toilet, and so forth. He provided himself here with a complete ready-made 'outfit' to appear in immediately after his transformation, until he could be supplied by regular tailors, haberdashers, and the rest. It included a hat, shoes, everything,—particularly shoulder braces; he put those on when he came to be fitted ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens

... frequently consisted partly of ready-made coats, kettles, and in some cases of jew's-harps. Tracts of land large enough for a town were sometimes sold for a barrel of cider. Now, this might appear rather a hard bargain for the Indians; but it must be considered that they had more land than they wanted, ...
— Stories of New Jersey • Frank Richard Stockton

... miserable slums, our sprawling, ugly, aimless industrial centres, inhabited by millions who have just enough education to be able to buy their thinking ready-made through the halfpenny Press and just enough leisure for a weekly attendance at the local football match and an annual excursion to Blackpool or Ramsgate; who seldom, if ever, see the glorious face of Nature and, when they do, gaze into it with blank unrecognising eyes; whose ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,



Words linked to "Ready-made" :   off-the-peg, artefact, ready-to-eat, ready-to-wear, artifact, made, off-the-shelf, unoriginal



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