All 14 Uses of
detach
in
The House of Mirth
- Lawrence Selden was in fact seated at its farther end; but though a book lay on his knee, his attention was not engaged with it, but directed to a lady whose lace-clad figure, as she leaned back in an adjoining chair, detached itself with exaggerated slimness against the dusky leather upholstery.†
Chpt 1.5
- It was the moment for tact; for the quick bridging over of gaps; but Selden still leaned against the window, a detached observer of the scene, and under the spell of his observation Lily felt herself powerless to exert her usual arts.†
Chpt 1.8
- It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again.†
Chpt 1.12
- Lily, however, was not among them, and her absence served to protract the effect she had produced on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see her too soon in the surroundings from which accident had so happily detached her.†
Chpt 1.12
- Completely as he had detached himself from her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance;
Chpt 2.1 *detached = separated
- Chance encounters, or even the repeated mention of her name, would send his thoughts back into grooves from which he had resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could be entirely excluded from his life, the pressure of new and varied impressions, with which no thought of her was connected, would soon complete the work of separation.†
Chpt 2.1
- From this group it was easy for him to detach Miss Bart on the pretext of a moment's glance into one of the brilliant shops along the terrace, and to say to her, while they lingered together in the white dazzle of a jeweller's window: "I stopped over to see you—to beg of you to leave the yacht."†
Chpt 2.3
- But what especially struck him was the way in which she detached herself, by a hundred undefinable shades, from the persons who most abounded in her own style.†
Chpt 2.3
- Never had she appeared more serenely mistress of the situation than when, at the moment of dispersal, detaching herself a little from the group about the table, she turned with a smile and a graceful slant of the shoulders to receive her cloak from Dorset.†
Chpt 2.3
- "Dreadful things—what things?" asked Gerty, gently detaching her wrists from her friend's feverish fingers.†
Chpt 2.8
- Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily's energies were centred in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained.†
Chpt 2.8
- But then the wide September light had filled the room, making it seem a part of the outer world: now the shaded lamps and the warm hearth, detaching it from the gathering darkness of the street, gave it a sweeter touch of intimacy.†
Chpt 2.12
- The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage, made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight sink trustfully against her breast.†
Chpt 2.13
- One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.†
Chpt 2.13
Definition:
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(detach) to separate something from something else (physically or emotionally)