All 5 Uses of
stifle
in
The House of Mirth
- The house, in its state of unnatural immaculateness and order, was as dreary as a tomb, and as Lily, turning from her brief repast between shrouded sideboards, wandered into the newly-uncovered glare of the drawing-room she felt as though she were buried alive in the stifling limits of Mrs. Peniston's existence.†
Chpt 1.9
- The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why he had stayed in it so long.†
Chpt 1.14 *
- Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston's lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will.†
Chpt 2.4
- The sudden escape from a stifling hotel in a dusty deserted city to the space and luxury of a great country-house fanned by sea breezes, had produced a state of moral lassitude agreeable enough after the nervous tension and physical discomfort of the past weeks.†
Chpt 2.5
- High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine.†
Chpt 2.9
Definition:
-
(stifle as in: stifling the urge) to suppress (prevent something or decrease its development) -- often political freedom