All 10 Uses of
expedient
in
The House of Mirth
- She would be free forever from the shifts, the expedients, the humiliations of the relatively poor.
Chpt 1.4 *expedients = actions taken because they are practical, but otherwise undesirable
- The system might at first necessitate a resort to some of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way.†
Chpt 1.4
- This impulse was reinforced by the reflection that if she had married Gryce she would have been surrounded by flattery and approval, whereas, having refused to sacrifice herself to expediency, she was left to bear the whole cost of her resistance.†
Chpt 1.7
- However, there could be no doubt of the expediency of showing herself in his box on the opening night of the opera; and after all, since Judy Trenor had promised to take him up that winter, it was as well to reap the advantage of being first in the field.†
Chpt 1.10
- But she was growing less sensitive on such points: a hard glaze of indifference was fast forming over her delicacies and susceptibilities, and each concession to expediency hardened the surface a little more.†
Chpt 2.5
- There could be no doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and she believed it rested with herself to raise his admiration to the point where it should bear down the lingering counsels of expediency.†
Chpt 2.6
- After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had so long moved it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed expediency.†
Chpt 2.7
- She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of "keeping up."†
Chpt 2.8
- To give up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house, or the provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty Farish's sitting-room, was an expedient which could only postpone the problem confronting her; and it seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was and find some means of earning her living.†
Chpt 2.8
- Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously assert that she had put several opportunities of this kind before Lily; but more legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out of her line as they were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally called upon to assist.†
Chpt 2.8
Definition:
-
(expedient) a practical action -- especially one that accepts negative tradeoffs due to circumstances
or:
convenient, speedy, or practical