All 11 Uses of
attain
in
The House of Mirth
- After attaining his majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels, the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another large property passed into her son's hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his "interests" demanded his presence in New York.†
Chpt 1.2
- She liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague diffusion of refinement and good taste.†
Chpt 1.3 *
- Her naturally good temper had been disciplined by years of enforced compliance, since she had almost always had to attain her ends by the circuitous path of other people's; and, being naturally inclined to face unpleasant facts as soon as they presented themselves, she was not sorry to hear an impartial statement of what her folly was likely to cost, the more so as her own thoughts were still insisting on the other side of the case.†
Chpt 1.7
- It was perhaps her very manner of holding herself aloof that appealed to his collector's passion for the rare and unattainable.†
Chpt 1.10
- All means seemed justifiable to attain such an end, or rather, by a happy shifting of lights with which practice had familiarized Miss Bart, the cause shrank to a pin-point in the general brightness of the effect.†
Chpt 1.10
- How this end had been attained was still matter for wonder, but it was clear that for the moment Miss Bart rested confidently in the result; and Selden tried to achieve the same view by telling himself that her opportunities for observation had been ampler than his own.†
Chpt 2.3
- The longing to get back to her former surroundings hardened to a fixed idea; but with the strengthening of her purpose came the inevitable perception that, to attain it, she must exact fresh concessions from her pride.†
Chpt 2.5
- For he was gradually attaining his object in life, and that, to Lily, was always less despicable than to miss it.†
Chpt 2.5
- She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert.†
Chpt 2.9
- She seemed suddenly to see her action as he would see it—and the fact of his own connection with it, the fact that, to attain her end, she must trade on his name, and profit by a secret of his past, chilled her blood with shame.†
Chpt 2.11
- —his words overwhelmed him with a realization of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the very moment of attainment.†
Chpt 2.14
Definition:
-
(attain) to gain or reach something with effort