lorgnette

He held a pair of tortoiseshell lorgnette glasses to his eyes, to get a better look at the flames climbing the building’s walls.

“Something new, Edna?” exclaimed Miss Mayblunt, with lorgnette directed toward a magnificent cluster of diamonds that sparkled, that almost sputtered, in Edna’s hair, just over the center of her forehead.

A lyrical aesthete and a Flaubertian prose polisher, he is pictured, in “Lucky Per,” as the sickly poet Enevoldsen, fussing with his lorgnette at a Copenhagen café while worrying about “where to put a comma.”

Also drawing the eye: a smart navy-and-black walking suit; a fan so ethereal the flowers on it seemed to be levitating; and a high-collared black opera cape, clearly intended to be worn with a lorgnette and an above-it-all attitude.

One hand carried a gigantic bag, the kind that holds passports, engagement diaries, and bridge scores, while the other hand toyed with that inevitable lorgnette, the enemy to other people’s privacy.