What is "straiten"

Usage examples of "straiten".

On one occasion Salicetti paid him three thousand francs, in assignats, as the price of his carriage, which his straitened circumstances obliged him to dispose of.

I said, in palliation of this dark fact, that I had heard my father say, some years before he died, that slavery was a great wrong, and that he would free the solitary Negro he then owned if he could think it right to give away the property of the family when he was so straitened in means.

I wish only to suggest, given what I must suffer, that it is undoubtedly more toilsome and more difficult, more subject to hunger and thirst, more destitute, straitened, and impoverished, for there can be no doubt that knights errant in the past endured many misfortunes in the course of their lives.

CHAPTER VIII The exposure of the plot was most prejudicial to the prosperity of the Ursuline community: spurious possession, far from bringing to their convent an increase of subscriptions and enhancing their reputation, as Mignon had promised, had ended for them in open shame, while in private they suffered from straitened circumstances, for the parents of their boarders hastened to withdraw their daughters from the convent, and the nuns in losing their pupils lost their sole source of income.

Continent to live a straitened life in Calais, as the late George Brummell had done when his creditors had closed in on him.

Certainly Madame Madeleine Mathiot de la Bec was a lady whose upper-class lineage could not be doubted, especially when she took him into the dimly lit salon to show him the work on the easel that straitened circumstances were forcing her to sell.

In a few seasons he straitened the coltishness with admonitions, faded the pink and gold with preaching, and produced a sad, grey wraith of wifehood who died, unprotesting, a year after her second son was born.

And if heavenly grace and true charity shall enter into thee, there shall be no envy, nor straitening of the heart, nor shall any self-love take possession of thee.

In the privacy of a four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hid from her own child a blush of remorse and shame.

The poor man ran out of his cottage, and his wife ran too, to welcome the strangers for the night and to offer them all the simple hospitality which they were able to give in straitened circumstances.

It is a melancholy reflection, Nell, but I fear I shouldn't be a very good wife for a man in straitened circumstances.

So ended the poor maid's humble little tale--whereby we learn that since a hundred million dollars in New York and twenty-two fish-hooks on the border of the Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy, a man in straitened circumstances is a fool to stay in New York when he can buy ten cents' worth of fish-hooks and emigrate.

Even in straitened circumstances a girl of good class, like Josephine, would certainly have been taught history and geography, given good books to read and listened intelligently to talks on the radio.

Swiveller to say, that, although the expenses of her education kept him in straitened circumstances for half a dozen years, he never slackened in his zeal, and always held himself sufficiently repaid by the accounts he heard (with great gravity) of her advancement, on his monthly visits to the governess, who looked upon him as a literary gentleman of eccentric habits, and of a most prodigious talent in quotation.

He was but fourteen when his father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances.